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Comment by Fellshard | Hacker News Reader

Reheated pure materialism. Not terribly interesting, and the only thing removing category distinctions here will do for you is give license to treat any organism however you wish - you have removed any semblance of moral consideration from the equation. And that, I think, few will accept: the experience each person has of living testifies against such a view. There is more to life, and to /our/ lives, than mere engineered material.

After all, what benefit is this article if it is simply one machine communicating to another?

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I also struggled to find an interesting new thought in the article. It was a bit nihilistic to just say that there is no dividing line and leave it at that. Great... there is no clear-cut line, so what?

Categorization is a tool for scientists to use for comparison. It's kind of like k-nearest neighbors learning. We have to draw the line for categories somewhere initially, then we adjust where that line is over time and add more categories if needed.

At the same time with taxonomy, we're basically lossy encoding the information and so data is lost or glossed over. IE, white walls aren't exactly white, there's other color information there but it's easier for our brains to encode. Creating lines, borders and categories is a lossy function and if objective truth is to be obtained, it's important to retain as much of it as possible while we can also be intellectually honest about our needs for such distinctions.

> the only thing removing category distinctions here will do for you is give license to treat any organism however you wish

This is only true if what stops you from treating certain organisms in a certain way are these objective category distinctions (rather than the approximate ones your brain makes), but I don't think that's generally how it works. People who wish to harm others will harm others regardless, the only thing that will stop them is consequences. On the other hand, people who don't wish harm to others will not harm others regardless of whether they believe objective categories or objective morality exists.

> People who wish to harm others will harm others regardless, the only thing that will stop them is consequences. On the other hand, people who don't wish harm to others will not harm others regardless of whether they believe objective categories or objective morality exists.

This discounts that there are those who wish to harm others who aim to persuade others still to look the other way or even join in on the harm. If the only argument against them is that they'll face consequences, they only have to grow their numbers large enough to avoid said consequences.

To say nothing of those who'll argue against there being any consequences in the first place.

>Not terribly interesting

>you have removed any semblance of moral consideration from the equation. And that, I think, few will accept

>what benefit is this article if it is simply one machine communicating to another

Are these arguments? What point are you making here?

>the experience each person has of living testifies against such a view. There is more to life, and to /our/ lives, than mere engineered material.

Why can't whatever experience of living you have be confined strictly within the bounds of materialism?

What would suggest it is strictly within the bounds of materialism? There must be some observation that underpins your idea that it is within the bounds of materialism to claim it is the simplest and most logical explanation. I'm not saying you are wrong, but I think we should be open to other explanations.

I only questioned the statement that "the experience each person has of living testifies against" materialism. I didn't say any of the things you mention in your post.

You assert there is 'more' without evidence beyond subjective experience.

Even if we are open to other possibilities, many are unfalsifiable and therefore they cannot be proven. Unprovable theories have limited value. Certainly not enough to discount what can be observed when the physical brain develops and decays.

Where did I assert there was more? I merely say that defaulting to materialism is not necessarily merited when you have so little evidence. I usually tend to take your stance, but nowadays I wish for more observations. Defaulting to materialism is a way of stopping creativity. We need more playfulness, is my claim. Its pure intuition, though, haven't done any research on it.

> There is more to life, and to /our/ lives, than mere engineered material.

Is there? Because we experience things that feel more profound?

Yes. That is one argument. It is the experience of life, we do not feel like automatons. Are you saying you had to write this reply? Or did you have a choice?

I feel like this is essentially religious thinking. It is odd to see this stance not being downvoted on a forum like this.

> you have removed any semblance of moral consideration from the equation

I think rather we have invented the notion of life so that we can divide the world into things that are morally relevant and things that are not. People do this all the time: my phylum is better than all the other phyla, my nation is better than all the other nations, my species is better than all the other species, my race is better than all the other races, my gender is better than the other gender (or all the other genders -- I am not trying to make this an argument about gender). We decide there is a scientific basis -- we declare this by fiat -- for ourselves having ethical privileges.

Morality does not need to be centered around preserving the privileges of the winner. We don't need the concept of life to decide what is right. For instance, there is the balance of perceived harm. If something does not have interests or a means of pursuing them, we need not concern ourselves with harming it.

In any case, deriving our ethics from reason and facts is at least as good as deriving it from distinctions of uncertain basis that happen to always work to our own benefit.

Is alternative to pure materialism "reality is mind"? Even from that perspective I currently cannot see how that simplifies the distinction between living or dead. When is there a moment where electron does not have a subjective experience but I do?

But morality only concerns itself a certain complex class of organisms, right? We don't weep for loss of innocent life we inflict when we take antibiotics.

Why is it necessarily an all or nothing question? Can't we simply say we concern ourselves more with complex organisms than less complex? That reveals the emptiness of this question of where you put the dividing line.

I don't needlessly kill bacteria, only when they threaten someone I love more than them do I kill them.

So yes there is a hierarchy, but they are on the list of things that are alive.

And if I first found bacteria in Mars, I would probably dedicate my life to preserving them depending on how abundant they are.

Morality is importantly a question for the individual. The question is, what do you weep for, not what do we weep for. If you're taking moral cues from others, you're not doing morality, just groupthink.

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