10 ms·

The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

23 points by optimalsolver 6y ago

wcerfgba 6y ago
> It might be nice to think that the universe has an inherent moral direction, but do we have any evidence that it does? And if we lack good evidence for these claims, surely respect for Occam’s razor ought to stop us from accepting them? This objection, though, is jam-packed with value-claims: It claims what we “ought” to believe and references “good” evidence. The very challenge pre-supposes the reality of value. So in attempting to provide evidence for his claims, Goff creates a weak framing for the necessity of evidence and then attacks the framing?
- hashkb 6y ago
  Yes, this is where he finally lost me.
fenomas 6y ago
> But the problem for .. 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. 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.
- konjin 6y ago
  Maths is what happens when you take nonsense very seriously. For some odd reason a subset of all the possible non-sense maps really well to the real world.
  - Ste_Evans 6y ago
    I think the terms used in Mathematics are a tad more precise than those in natural language e.g. 1 is fairly clear, "moral" is not as clear. 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.
    - ukj 6y ago
      Clear to whom? The meaning of "1" is conventional/socially constructed. 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.
      - Kednicma 6y ago
        To be extremely precise: 1 is the successor of 0. Anywhere that there is a natural numbers object, there's a semantics for this statement. What is socially constructed here is the choice of topos which hosts the natural numbers object!
        ukj 6y ago
        SUCC(0) is no explanation of 1, until you explain 0. 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 ;)
        Kednicma 6y ago
        Humans are what, about 99.9% similar to each other on average? So that gives me 3 nines belief that yes, if I can understand, then you can understand; we're just humans after all. I think that you're being sarcastic; once we define categories, Cartesian closed categories, and elementary topoi, then categorical set theory is a straightforward sequence of diagram schemata. But I understand your point! 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.
- Ste_Evans 6y ago
  You are nearly there. It is hand-waving psychobabble paid for with taxes. This fraud and narcissist, Goff, is employed by a UK university. This is the tw*t that wrote "Galileo's Error". Presumably, he'll be bringing out a sequel, "Einstein's hopeless confusion".
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > Mathematical truths are defined to be true 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.
  - jjgreen 6y ago
    Do you think? I'd say that axioms were just taken; there's no commitment to their truth (since there is no need for it, and mathematics likes economy).
    - qznc 6y ago
      Axiom are just taken but over time we picked the most useful ones. This is why they map well to the physical world. The baffling thing is how few and simple axioms we need for them to be useful.
    - amelius 6y ago
      It also doesn't make sense to define axioms as true. What if later it turns out that the axioms were a mutual contradiction?
      - jjgreen 6y ago
        Truth is tricky. If I state "The sky is blue", I can look out of the window, the sky is blue, my statement corresponds to the state of the world, my statement is true, right? But in mathematics there is no window, everything is internal, abstract, so what does "truth" mean when there is no state of the world with which to compare? More importantly, would the mathematics be any different if the axioms are declared to be true? No, it wouldn't make any difference at all. So let's leave "truth" to the physicists and philosophers.
        chousuke 6y ago
        This is perhaps not all that relevant to your point, but "the sky is blue" so often being used as an example of an obvious truth is amusing to me, because very often the sky is not all that blue at all. 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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- brudgers 6y ago
  The argument echos Kant...which is too big a sea to boil in a comment. So at geostationary orbit, Kant's metaphysics says we cannot have absolute knowledge of the empirical world, only knowledge mediated by the a priori conditions of human experience, space and time. However, we can have absolute knowledge of morals because such knowledge is not dependent on the aforementioned a priori conditions of human experience. 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.
Kees_Veel 6y ago
This part of the universe, me, knows that the article is wrong. So yes. But the same part of the universe also knows that the rest doesn't know shit. No evidence required, you can trust me, I'm from the universe.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
keiferski 6y ago
Panpsychism is a pretty interesting idea, but this article does a poor job of explaining it and then making its own moral argument. I'd say skip the article and read this instead: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ 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.
Drakim 6y ago
Here is my take: 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.
- lhorie 6y ago
  Consider that even murder isn't universally considered bad. Examples include wars, self defense, proponents of the death penalty, the sentinelese, etc. Debates can get particularly heated when one gets into things like abortion and ethical dilemmas. 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.
donatj 6y ago
Right off the bat it fails epicly in its comparison of Gandhi to Epstein as bastions of good and evil, as apparently the author is completely unaware of Gandhi’s sleeping with children? What a horrible choice for the side of good, given Epstein’s horrendous misdeeds. 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.
- titzer 6y ago
  I share your disdain. 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).
  - pas 6y ago
    > just think about what it must feel like to be one of a trillion trillion trillion hydrogen atoms [...] 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.
mirekrusin 6y ago
"(...) consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it (...)". I'm not sure if it means much. It's like saying that spheres prevade universe. Great, now what? Is cat hunting little bird good or bad? Depends who you ask. Consciousness and forms of life in general are recursions where emergent memory and prediction qualifies it on the wide spectrum of sophistication. Natural selection creates unhappy "recursions" from the moment when one eats the other and discovers it gives great energy boost. Feeling pain/pleasure is emergent feature shaped by natural selection. But there is nothing fundamental about it that says good predictors must have it. Evaluating options on more global scale move you closer to more global rights/wrongs, that's all.
bawolff 6y ago
Maybe im missing it, but the argument seems to be morality is objective because everyone thinks it is. How is that not begging the question? 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.
- ukj 6y ago
  Every question beggs another. Münchhausen trilemma All definitions are (meta)circular. Because language is recursive.
  - radford-neal 6y ago
    So far, in this brief comment and a brief comment above, you've mentioned Goodhart's law, the McNamara fallacy, and the Munchhausen trilemma. I know nothing of any of these. 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.
    - ukj 6y ago
      I like terseness. 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.
qubex 6y ago
“Arguemnt by analogy is very powerful and entirely fallacious.” —Mr Dawson, my teacher of Theory of Knowledge (epistemology and critical thinking), circa 1997 So... there is this guy, who has an opinion... okay... and?
BlueTemplar 6y ago
I am a believer in a form of panspsychism myself, but this article is baffling. > 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...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
aaanotherhnfolk 6y ago
I have only a layman's grasp of philosophy. Why doesn't this field challenge its definitions of consciousness more, and why is ethics treated as an axiom? These both seem like anthropocentric positions to me, limiting the discourse. Why can't trees have a conscious experience? And who cares about the morality of a storm cloud?
danidiaz 6y ago
Bart Streumer is mentioned in the piece. His book "Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory about All Normative Judgements" begins with a pretty cool sentence: > 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.
- keiferski 6y ago
  Honestly not a bad approach. I wish more people just shared their ideas instead of trying to persuade and convert me to their position.
  - manofmanysmiles 6y ago
    How can you really understand someone’s ideas without understanding all the premises? 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?
    - keiferski 6y ago
      Not sure how you get this from the quote. I meant that I prefer it when the mood of a book is this is interesting/beautiful/insightful and not this is my conclusion, now I’m going to construct an argument to convince you it’s the right one.
      - manofmanysmiles 6y ago
        I think my reaction stemmed from > 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.”
ikeboy 6y ago
>This objection, though, is jam-packed with value-claims: It claims what we “ought” to believe and references “good” evidence. The very challenge pre-supposes the reality of value. 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.
motohagiography 6y ago
There is an argument for theism that I find very persuasive, which is that, faith is a ridiculous conclusion but a necessary axiom. The point being it's not something you arrive at through reason after ruling out the alternatives, it's just a point you start at, or not. 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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tasty_freeze 6y ago
I tried reading "Mere Christianity" by CS Lewis on the strong recommendation of a friend. 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.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  > some are absolute and transcend place and time 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.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Grounding a discussion of universal morality in Greek philosophy as a basis for condemning Jeffrey Epstein is a remarkable excercise at ignoring the elephant in the room. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece 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.)
bobthechef 6y ago
"We cannot account for necessary truths in terms of things that could have been different. To take Aristotle’s view: We might have evolved to have natures directed toward cruelty. In such a counterfactual scenario, we would have moral grounds for cruelty, which runs counter to our deepest moral convictions. Any view which tries to ground moral truth in things that might have been different is going to face a similar problem. There will be some counterfactual scenario in which the putative ground of morality is absent or points us toward evil rather than the good." 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.

23 points by optimalsolver 6y ago

> It might be nice to think that the universe has an inherent moral direction, but do we have any evidence that it does? And if we lack good evidence for these claims, surely respect for Occam’s razor ought to stop us from accepting them? This objection, though, is jam-packed with value-claims: It claims what we “ought” to believe and references “good” evidence. The very challenge pre-supposes the reality of value. So in attempting to provide evidence for his claims, Goff creates a weak framing for the necessity of evidence and then attacks the framing?

hashkb 6y ago
Yes, this is where he finally lost me.

fenomas 6y ago

> But the problem for .. 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. 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.

konjin 6y ago
Maths is what happens when you take nonsense very seriously. For some odd reason a subset of all the possible non-sense maps really well to the real world.
- Ste_Evans 6y ago
  I think the terms used in Mathematics are a tad more precise than those in natural language e.g. 1 is fairly clear, "moral" is not as clear. 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.
  - ukj 6y ago
    Clear to whom? The meaning of "1" is conventional/socially constructed. 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.
    - Kednicma 6y ago
      To be extremely precise: 1 is the successor of 0. Anywhere that there is a natural numbers object, there's a semantics for this statement. What is socially constructed here is the choice of topos which hosts the natural numbers object!
      - ukj 6y ago
        SUCC(0) is no explanation of 1, until you explain 0. 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 ;)
        Kednicma 6y ago
        Humans are what, about 99.9% similar to each other on average? So that gives me 3 nines belief that yes, if I can understand, then you can understand; we're just humans after all. I think that you're being sarcastic; once we define categories, Cartesian closed categories, and elementary topoi, then categorical set theory is a straightforward sequence of diagram schemata. But I understand your point! 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.
Ste_Evans 6y ago
You are nearly there. It is hand-waving psychobabble paid for with taxes. This fraud and narcissist, Goff, is employed by a UK university. This is the tw*t that wrote "Galileo's Error". Presumably, he'll be bringing out a sequel, "Einstein's hopeless confusion".
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> Mathematical truths are defined to be true 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.
- jjgreen 6y ago
  Do you think? I'd say that axioms were just taken; there's no commitment to their truth (since there is no need for it, and mathematics likes economy).
  - qznc 6y ago
    Axiom are just taken but over time we picked the most useful ones. This is why they map well to the physical world. The baffling thing is how few and simple axioms we need for them to be useful.
  - amelius 6y ago
    It also doesn't make sense to define axioms as true. What if later it turns out that the axioms were a mutual contradiction?
    - jjgreen 6y ago
      Truth is tricky. If I state "The sky is blue", I can look out of the window, the sky is blue, my statement corresponds to the state of the world, my statement is true, right? But in mathematics there is no window, everything is internal, abstract, so what does "truth" mean when there is no state of the world with which to compare? More importantly, would the mathematics be any different if the axioms are declared to be true? No, it wouldn't make any difference at all. So let's leave "truth" to the physicists and philosophers.
      - chousuke 6y ago
        This is perhaps not all that relevant to your point, but "the sky is blue" so often being used as an example of an obvious truth is amusing to me, because very often the sky is not all that blue at all. 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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
brudgers 6y ago
The argument echos Kant...which is too big a sea to boil in a comment. So at geostationary orbit, Kant's metaphysics says we cannot have absolute knowledge of the empirical world, only knowledge mediated by the a priori conditions of human experience, space and time. However, we can have absolute knowledge of morals because such knowledge is not dependent on the aforementioned a priori conditions of human experience. 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.

Kees_Veel 6y ago

This part of the universe, me, knows that the article is wrong. So yes. But the same part of the universe also knows that the rest doesn't know shit. No evidence required, you can trust me, I'm from the universe.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

keiferski 6y ago

Panpsychism is a pretty interesting idea, but this article does a poor job of explaining it and then making its own moral argument. I'd say skip the article and read this instead: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ 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.

Drakim 6y ago

Here is my take: 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.

lhorie 6y ago
Consider that even murder isn't universally considered bad. Examples include wars, self defense, proponents of the death penalty, the sentinelese, etc. Debates can get particularly heated when one gets into things like abortion and ethical dilemmas. 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.

donatj 6y ago

Right off the bat it fails epicly in its comparison of Gandhi to Epstein as bastions of good and evil, as apparently the author is completely unaware of Gandhi’s sleeping with children? What a horrible choice for the side of good, given Epstein’s horrendous misdeeds. 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.

titzer 6y ago
I share your disdain. 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).
- pas 6y ago
  > just think about what it must feel like to be one of a trillion trillion trillion hydrogen atoms [...] 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.

mirekrusin 6y ago

"(...) consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it (...)". I'm not sure if it means much. It's like saying that spheres prevade universe. Great, now what? Is cat hunting little bird good or bad? Depends who you ask. Consciousness and forms of life in general are recursions where emergent memory and prediction qualifies it on the wide spectrum of sophistication. Natural selection creates unhappy "recursions" from the moment when one eats the other and discovers it gives great energy boost. Feeling pain/pleasure is emergent feature shaped by natural selection. But there is nothing fundamental about it that says good predictors must have it. Evaluating options on more global scale move you closer to more global rights/wrongs, that's all.

bawolff 6y ago

Maybe im missing it, but the argument seems to be morality is objective because everyone thinks it is. How is that not begging the question? 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.

ukj 6y ago
Every question beggs another. Münchhausen trilemma All definitions are (meta)circular. Because language is recursive.
- radford-neal 6y ago
  So far, in this brief comment and a brief comment above, you've mentioned Goodhart's law, the McNamara fallacy, and the Munchhausen trilemma. I know nothing of any of these. 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.
  - ukj 6y ago
    I like terseness. 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.

qubex 6y ago

“Arguemnt by analogy is very powerful and entirely fallacious.” —Mr Dawson, my teacher of Theory of Knowledge (epistemology and critical thinking), circa 1997 So... there is this guy, who has an opinion... okay... and?

BlueTemplar 6y ago

I am a believer in a form of panspsychism myself, but this article is baffling. > 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...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

aaanotherhnfolk 6y ago

I have only a layman's grasp of philosophy. Why doesn't this field challenge its definitions of consciousness more, and why is ethics treated as an axiom? These both seem like anthropocentric positions to me, limiting the discourse. Why can't trees have a conscious experience? And who cares about the morality of a storm cloud?

danidiaz 6y ago

Bart Streumer is mentioned in the piece. His book "Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory about All Normative Judgements" begins with a pretty cool sentence: > 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.

keiferski 6y ago
Honestly not a bad approach. I wish more people just shared their ideas instead of trying to persuade and convert me to their position.
- manofmanysmiles 6y ago
  How can you really understand someone’s ideas without understanding all the premises? 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?
  - keiferski 6y ago
    Not sure how you get this from the quote. I meant that I prefer it when the mood of a book is this is interesting/beautiful/insightful and not this is my conclusion, now I’m going to construct an argument to convince you it’s the right one.
    - manofmanysmiles 6y ago
      I think my reaction stemmed from > 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.”

ikeboy 6y ago

>This objection, though, is jam-packed with value-claims: It claims what we “ought” to believe and references “good” evidence. The very challenge pre-supposes the reality of value. 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.

motohagiography 6y ago

There is an argument for theism that I find very persuasive, which is that, faith is a ridiculous conclusion but a necessary axiom. The point being it's not something you arrive at through reason after ruling out the alternatives, it's just a point you start at, or not. 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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tasty_freeze 6y ago

I tried reading "Mere Christianity" by CS Lewis on the strong recommendation of a friend. 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.

Sebb767 6y ago
> some are absolute and transcend place and time 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.

dredmorbius 6y ago

Grounding a discussion of universal morality in Greek philosophy as a basis for condemning Jeffrey Epstein is a remarkable excercise at ignoring the elephant in the room. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece 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.)

bobthechef 6y ago

"We cannot account for necessary truths in terms of things that could have been different. To take Aristotle’s view: We might have evolved to have natures directed toward cruelty. In such a counterfactual scenario, we would have moral grounds for cruelty, which runs counter to our deepest moral convictions. Any view which tries to ground moral truth in things that might have been different is going to face a similar problem. There will be some counterfactual scenario in which the putative ground of morality is absent or points us toward evil rather than the good." 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.