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I'm curious why you openly hold what seems to me a totally sociopathic viewpoint - do you assign any moral weight to anything at all? If so, why do you not assi

I'm curious why you openly hold what seems to me a totally sociopathic viewpoint - do you assign any moral weight to anything at all? If so, why do you not assign moral weight to the suffering of conscious beings? Even from a completely amoral perspective where nothing is preferable to anything else, do you not see the social benefits of a community which has the socially-enforced value of "suffering is bad"?

imgabe 7y ago
Yes, I even explicitly mentioned social reasons in the previous comment. A society in which humans are all actively trying to eat each other obviously would not function as well as the one we have, where we generally all agree that it's not all right to eat other humans. The reason for it is not for some nebulous, indefinable moral reason about preventing suffering, but simply because one works and the other does not.
- aoeusnth1 7y ago
  You seem to be confusing how something might come to exist (Darwinian explanation of altruism) with why someone might choose to adhere to a philosophy. Personally, as far as I can tell, most people I know are both intrinsically good and also extrinsically good in that they have considered nihilism and rejected it in favor of, like, having any value system and preferences about how the world should be at all.
  - imgabe 7y ago
    I never said I didn't have preferences about how the world should be. They are just a little more nuanced than "this class of living things should be kept alive and feeling happy and that class of living things should not" In general I prefer life should go on living and creating more life in a sustainable fashion, but generally that does involve some amount of suffering for some life somewhere.
- aoeusnth1 7y ago
  To be clear, what irritates me about your comments is not that you don't care about suffering - it's that you're taking it on yourself to tell other people not to care about things they do value. What does it matter to you? An amoral framework has no basis whatsoever to argue that any value system is wrong. Why would a moral person care about the material reasons why society is altruistic? There's nothing you can argue at the object level that will change someone's moral values.
  - imgabe 7y ago
    Where did I tell someone else what to care about?
  - sridca 7y ago
    Does it also irritate you knowing that vocal vegans take it upon themselves to tell other people to care about things they do not particularly value? If not, why not?
sonnyblarney 7y ago
This is the nihilist/materialist rhetorical trap. If you take scientific materialism to it's extreme 'we are all just particles' ergo, none of intelligence/life/love/wisdom/creation even really exist, it's all just how we perceive randomness. 'Sociopaths' and 'Psychopaths' cannot exist in materialism after all: we're just mounds of atoms. But once you accept the life principle, which is not so well defined but nevertheless evident to us all at least due to the fact we are conscious ... well then you can start to arrive at why we might think we are 'more important' than rocks. Then things like 'community' etc. make sense. But one's metaphysical view needs to have something more transcendent that e=mc2 at the root of it in order for it to work. The OP's comments are actually reasonable in the context of materialism, and that they are a little 'shocking' to someone normally engaged in life is only evidence of the hollowness of our current rational regimes at explaining the most basic question, which is 'who/what are we'. Knowing how 'dark matter' works will be nice, but it's still secondary to understanding the nature of life itself, I think.

imgabe 7y ago

Yes, I even explicitly mentioned social reasons in the previous comment. A society in which humans are all actively trying to eat each other obviously would not function as well as the one we have, where we generally all agree that it's not all right to eat other humans. The reason for it is not for some nebulous, indefinable moral reason about preventing suffering, but simply because one works and the other does not.

aoeusnth1 7y ago
You seem to be confusing how something might come to exist (Darwinian explanation of altruism) with why someone might choose to adhere to a philosophy. Personally, as far as I can tell, most people I know are both intrinsically good and also extrinsically good in that they have considered nihilism and rejected it in favor of, like, having any value system and preferences about how the world should be at all.
- imgabe 7y ago
  I never said I didn't have preferences about how the world should be. They are just a little more nuanced than "this class of living things should be kept alive and feeling happy and that class of living things should not" In general I prefer life should go on living and creating more life in a sustainable fashion, but generally that does involve some amount of suffering for some life somewhere.
aoeusnth1 7y ago
To be clear, what irritates me about your comments is not that you don't care about suffering - it's that you're taking it on yourself to tell other people not to care about things they do value. What does it matter to you? An amoral framework has no basis whatsoever to argue that any value system is wrong. Why would a moral person care about the material reasons why society is altruistic? There's nothing you can argue at the object level that will change someone's moral values.
- imgabe 7y ago
  Where did I tell someone else what to care about?
- sridca 7y ago
  Does it also irritate you knowing that vocal vegans take it upon themselves to tell other people to care about things they do not particularly value? If not, why not?

sonnyblarney 7y ago

This is the nihilist/materialist rhetorical trap. If you take scientific materialism to it's extreme 'we are all just particles' ergo, none of intelligence/life/love/wisdom/creation even really exist, it's all just how we perceive randomness. 'Sociopaths' and 'Psychopaths' cannot exist in materialism after all: we're just mounds of atoms. But once you accept the life principle, which is not so well defined but nevertheless evident to us all at least due to the fact we are conscious ... well then you can start to arrive at why we might think we are 'more important' than rocks. Then things like 'community' etc. make sense. But one's metaphysical view needs to have something more transcendent that e=mc2 at the root of it in order for it to work. The OP's comments are actually reasonable in the context of materialism, and that they are a little 'shocking' to someone normally engaged in life is only evidence of the hollowness of our current rational regimes at explaining the most basic question, which is 'who/what are we'. Knowing how 'dark matter' works will be nice, but it's still secondary to understanding the nature of life itself, I think.