5 ms·

These are just starting points. I do think goals are themselves good or bad, but it's much harder to explain how you can objectively make assertions like that,

by curi 19y ago

These are just starting points. I do think goals are themselves good or bad, but it's much harder to explain how you can objectively make assertions like that, so I wanted to make the lesser claim, for now: there are ways to explore morality objectively. I'm definitely not claiming consistency of this sort is the only criterion of morality. Only that it's an important and objective one. I don't mean to be a tease, but if I say too many things at once, I won't be understood as well. On the other hand, threads here go stale fast (usually in under a day), so I'm not sure how to ever get very far in explaining, here. By contrast, on another forum, I am in a thread that has been going for 4 years. And it's only 180 comments long -- so around 1 comment per 8 days. I'll keep posting here if anyone replies. Or contact me, curi42 on AIM or curi@curi.us So for depth, my best idea so far is to link longer, external writing. Here are two things I wrote about morality which explain my views a bit more: Essay: http://www.curi.us/blog/post/1252-xii http://www.curi.us/blog/post/1252-xii Dialog: http://www.curi.us/blog/post/1169-morality http://www.curi.us/blog/post/1169-morality

yters 19y ago
Ah, good. I figured I wasn't getting the whole picture. Something similar to objectivism makes sense to me. I think there is such a thing as human nature, so everyone is ultimately made happy by the same things, at a certain granularity. Morality's objectively good goal, in your framework, is to maximize happiness. However, at this point I have to veer into territory considered "religious," because such a claim requires at least an element of non-materialism to make sense of our moral intuitions. At any rate, my views are not rigorously defined enough, and I'd benefit from critical, constructive discussion. I'll check out your links and see if I can participate.
- curi 19y ago
  If it's any help: I don't think there is any such thing as 'human nature', though I do think there is a lot of complex knowledge in cultures that achieves some of the same practical results. I don't think the purpose of morality, or life, is to maximize happiness. I suspect maximizing happiness is consistent with the right way of life, if you understand enough, but I don't think it's the best way to look at things, and I think it makes it harder to see the answers. In general, ideas don't need foundations. "You can't justify that," is not a valid criticism. This includes moral ideas. So if you have a "moral intuition", or think a common sense notion of morality makes sense, but can't justify it perfectly, I don't think that's a problem. It may be a sign of religion, but not a bad one. The correct way to look at ideas is not to seek justification, but instead to compare them to rival theories. In other words, ask, "Got a better idea?" If there is no rival theory, then criticism is sort of useless. It can help us notice we'd like a better theory and find places to look for new ideas. But without a rival theory to compare with, we can't see which theory seems truer, or which stands up to criticism better, and can't abandon the current theory. The ideas about foundations and justifications here were best explained in published work by Karl Popper, and also somewhat by David Deutsch (but more to come, he should have a new book out within 2 years). They are not especially popular, but in my judgment they actually make sense, unlike all the rival philosophies. If you read Popper, be aware that he never wrote much applying his ideas to morality or education. He wrote a lot about science, and about communism and historicism, and also about certain (bad) schools of philosophy, but also explained epistemology in abstract. Guess that's long enough for now. For what it's worth, I like fielding (non-hostile) questions in these areas.
  - yters 19y ago
    I guess I should rephrase it as morality's goal maximises happiness. What would you propose as an objective moral goal? Do you recommend anything by Popper or Deutsch specifically?
    - curi 19y ago
      Deutsch only has one book out, which is very good. My only warning is that half of it is sort of off topic (physics, virtual reality, computation, time travel). But that's ok, because of the density of ideas fit into each chapter. http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-Implications/dp/014027541X/ http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-Impl... Popper has lots of books. Maybe The Myth of the Framework is a good choice. As I recall, it has content from lectures he gave to people not already familiar with his philosophy, so those parts are especially clear and accessible. Proposing an actual moral goal is tricky, because we have to be careful to keep separate the issues of whether there are true moral ideas, and whether my particular idea is true. And very strictly, my idea will not be true. It will have truth to it, but not be perfect. Which may be a confusing concept, because the prevailing epistemology says that knowledge is "justified, true belief" by which it means 100% absolutely, perfectly true. That perspective discounts any possibility of "partial truths" as knowledge. Further, it encourages people to believe they possess (final, certain) truths. But I don't claim to have any of those, nor do I think one can have those. If you're OK with all that, I can tell you some tentative guesses at moral truths.
      - yters 19y ago
        Yeah go ahead.
        curi 19y ago
        To any disagreeable people reading this: please bear in mind that if you say the following ideas are incorrect, and that therefore I am incorrect to say morality can be approached objectively ... you will be contradicting yourself, because you will have made an assertion about the objective truth of the matter (that I am, in fact, mistaken). So some good goals, in my opinion: Long term: open-ended knowledge creation Medium term: cure aging, invent self-replicating nanobots, win war on terror, write important book, invent AI Short term: make a sandwich, be kind to one's children, quit smoking, make a useful product, solve a problem you were having, learn how to play Mario Galaxy well None of these are (I imagine) especially odd. That is because we have to start where we are. We already have goals. Most of them are good goals to pursue, for now. In the event we decide we want something better, or see a problem with them, we should seek to make (gradual) improvements. So, nothing revolutionary here. In fact, while I think most people are mistaken about moral philosophy, I don't have a problem with most of their actual ideas about how to live day to day. We have the most peaceful, cooperative, and effective civilization ever to exist; or, in other words, we have the most knowledge of morality that has ever existed. Average people have this, and use it in their routine lives. Can we do even better? Of course. But most of my suggestions are not about changing one's goals, but instead about changing how one tries to accomplish them. So, for example, it is very important to enjoy criticism. This is common knowledge, but people still have trouble with it, and often don't fully understand the reasons it's important. To sketch out my answer, criticism stabilizes true ideas (because they withstand it better than their rivals), while an environment without criticism does not differentiate truth and falsity. And criticism is a means of error correction. Error correction is the only way to reliably achieve any goal. There is no way to reliably come up with the right approach, initially, so anyone who wants to consistently succeed has to be able to find and correct errors. Why do people dislike criticism, anyway? They take it personally. They hear that they are mistaken, or bad, but they want to be right. That is an irrational and ineffective attitude towards life. If you want to be right, the only path forward is to be willing to change what you are, until you are what's right. And whether you are criticized or not does not change whether you are mistaken. It only changes whether you find out about it. That is a gift. Instead of being mistaken and ignorant, you have a change to change your mind. So to tie this back to what I was saying earlier, one of the common points for the best way to accomplish many different goals, is to enjoy criticism. Alternative approaches such as disliking and avoiding (some) criticism are immoral, because they sabotage achieving one's goals. The more distasteful you find criticism, the less reliably you can accomplish what you want to. To add to this, we could go through all the different attitudes which are important to learning and problem solving in general, and list them as important pieces of morality. They are all fundamental to how we should live.

by curi 19y ago

yters 19y ago

Ah, good. I figured I wasn't getting the whole picture. Something similar to objectivism makes sense to me. I think there is such a thing as human nature, so everyone is ultimately made happy by the same things, at a certain granularity. Morality's objectively good goal, in your framework, is to maximize happiness. However, at this point I have to veer into territory considered "religious," because such a claim requires at least an element of non-materialism to make sense of our moral intuitions. At any rate, my views are not rigorously defined enough, and I'd benefit from critical, constructive discussion. I'll check out your links and see if I can participate.

curi 19y ago
If it's any help: I don't think there is any such thing as 'human nature', though I do think there is a lot of complex knowledge in cultures that achieves some of the same practical results. I don't think the purpose of morality, or life, is to maximize happiness. I suspect maximizing happiness is consistent with the right way of life, if you understand enough, but I don't think it's the best way to look at things, and I think it makes it harder to see the answers. In general, ideas don't need foundations. "You can't justify that," is not a valid criticism. This includes moral ideas. So if you have a "moral intuition", or think a common sense notion of morality makes sense, but can't justify it perfectly, I don't think that's a problem. It may be a sign of religion, but not a bad one. The correct way to look at ideas is not to seek justification, but instead to compare them to rival theories. In other words, ask, "Got a better idea?" If there is no rival theory, then criticism is sort of useless. It can help us notice we'd like a better theory and find places to look for new ideas. But without a rival theory to compare with, we can't see which theory seems truer, or which stands up to criticism better, and can't abandon the current theory. The ideas about foundations and justifications here were best explained in published work by Karl Popper, and also somewhat by David Deutsch (but more to come, he should have a new book out within 2 years). They are not especially popular, but in my judgment they actually make sense, unlike all the rival philosophies. If you read Popper, be aware that he never wrote much applying his ideas to morality or education. He wrote a lot about science, and about communism and historicism, and also about certain (bad) schools of philosophy, but also explained epistemology in abstract. Guess that's long enough for now. For what it's worth, I like fielding (non-hostile) questions in these areas.
- yters 19y ago
  I guess I should rephrase it as morality's goal maximises happiness. What would you propose as an objective moral goal? Do you recommend anything by Popper or Deutsch specifically?
  - curi 19y ago
    Deutsch only has one book out, which is very good. My only warning is that half of it is sort of off topic (physics, virtual reality, computation, time travel). But that's ok, because of the density of ideas fit into each chapter. http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-Implications/dp/014027541X/ http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-Impl... Popper has lots of books. Maybe The Myth of the Framework is a good choice. As I recall, it has content from lectures he gave to people not already familiar with his philosophy, so those parts are especially clear and accessible. Proposing an actual moral goal is tricky, because we have to be careful to keep separate the issues of whether there are true moral ideas, and whether my particular idea is true. And very strictly, my idea will not be true. It will have truth to it, but not be perfect. Which may be a confusing concept, because the prevailing epistemology says that knowledge is "justified, true belief" by which it means 100% absolutely, perfectly true. That perspective discounts any possibility of "partial truths" as knowledge. Further, it encourages people to believe they possess (final, certain) truths. But I don't claim to have any of those, nor do I think one can have those. If you're OK with all that, I can tell you some tentative guesses at moral truths.
    - yters 19y ago
      Yeah go ahead.
      - curi 19y ago
        To any disagreeable people reading this: please bear in mind that if you say the following ideas are incorrect, and that therefore I am incorrect to say morality can be approached objectively ... you will be contradicting yourself, because you will have made an assertion about the objective truth of the matter (that I am, in fact, mistaken). So some good goals, in my opinion: Long term: open-ended knowledge creation Medium term: cure aging, invent self-replicating nanobots, win war on terror, write important book, invent AI Short term: make a sandwich, be kind to one's children, quit smoking, make a useful product, solve a problem you were having, learn how to play Mario Galaxy well None of these are (I imagine) especially odd. That is because we have to start where we are. We already have goals. Most of them are good goals to pursue, for now. In the event we decide we want something better, or see a problem with them, we should seek to make (gradual) improvements. So, nothing revolutionary here. In fact, while I think most people are mistaken about moral philosophy, I don't have a problem with most of their actual ideas about how to live day to day. We have the most peaceful, cooperative, and effective civilization ever to exist; or, in other words, we have the most knowledge of morality that has ever existed. Average people have this, and use it in their routine lives. Can we do even better? Of course. But most of my suggestions are not about changing one's goals, but instead about changing how one tries to accomplish them. So, for example, it is very important to enjoy criticism. This is common knowledge, but people still have trouble with it, and often don't fully understand the reasons it's important. To sketch out my answer, criticism stabilizes true ideas (because they withstand it better than their rivals), while an environment without criticism does not differentiate truth and falsity. And criticism is a means of error correction. Error correction is the only way to reliably achieve any goal. There is no way to reliably come up with the right approach, initially, so anyone who wants to consistently succeed has to be able to find and correct errors. Why do people dislike criticism, anyway? They take it personally. They hear that they are mistaken, or bad, but they want to be right. That is an irrational and ineffective attitude towards life. If you want to be right, the only path forward is to be willing to change what you are, until you are what's right. And whether you are criticized or not does not change whether you are mistaken. It only changes whether you find out about it. That is a gift. Instead of being mistaken and ignorant, you have a change to change your mind. So to tie this back to what I was saying earlier, one of the common points for the best way to accomplish many different goals, is to enjoy criticism. Alternative approaches such as disliking and avoiding (some) criticism are immoral, because they sabotage achieving one's goals. The more distasteful you find criticism, the less reliably you can accomplish what you want to. To add to this, we could go through all the different attitudes which are important to learning and problem solving in general, and list them as important pieces of morality. They are all fundamental to how we should live.