4 ms·
It's a well meaning article. My first thought is that it's generated by AI in the service of some moderate yet far reaching religious org. "Finding our intrins
by tehchromic 4y ago
It's a well meaning article. My first thought is that it's generated by AI in the service of some moderate yet far reaching religious org.
"Finding our intrinsic values is no trivial task, but something that forces us to stare into the core of our humanity."
I think it misses a critical topical conclusion which is that "intrinsic values" means little or nothing to many, and many folks are fairly incapable of competently doing the kind of contemplative meditating required to arrive at some set of rules like that, and so they look to others.
And here's the crux of the missed point:
To really resonate with our intrinsic values, we need to drop the myth that a rational economic system exists, and build one with the value of present and future human life explicitly built in.
We already have a massive framework for understanding individual intrinsic values in terms of the sanctity of human life and that's the great mystery religions that have birth to our modern age. What's needed now is a planetary ethos where intrinsic human value is put in the proper context of the ecological reality of the biological and geological systems and processes that sustain us. Building that culture requires myth and magic, but also is an intensely rational project. There is really no way around it, and any philosophical text intended to shift the cultural landscape is incomplete without it.
- openfuture 4y agoPlease join us on matrix! Starting from datalisp.is.
- jcelerier 4y ago> first thought is that it's generated by AI We're in the Yosemite park bear era of AI: there is considerable overlap between the capabilities of the most intelligent AI and the most stupid humans ... And that's very generous to humans
- pas 4y ago> sanctity of human life what's so sacrosanct about life? life is common, many argue too common. (see the overpopulation hysteria.) I'd argue there are better things that we should hold dear, like empathy and cooperation, the resilience of getting up after devastating events, our ability to cooperate in even the most abstract frameworks.
- sifar 4y agoYou do realize none of them would exist without life.
- pas 4y agoyes, of course, but life is just a necessary not sufficient condition.
- sifar 4y agoSorry i cannot parse this. How can you value something and not the thing that it cannot exist without ?
- Thiez 4y agoLife cannot exist without excrement, but relatively few people think highly of poop. What is your point? If you go far enough with your reasoning you have to basically value the entire universe and everything in it to be allowed to say you value any particular thing. It dilutes the meaning of valuing something to the point where the word/concept itself becomes meaningless.
- the_af 4y agoI disagree. You cannot hold this principle "in theory" without understanding the specifics of this case. It makes no sense to value (human) empathy and cooperation without valuing (human) life. You can argue about first principles, excrement and the universe, but this will still be true. Without valuing human life, all sorts of things start to unravel in our society. Of course, just life is not enough! Empathy, cooperation, kindness, curiosity, etc: all things that make the human experience worthy.
- pas 4y agoHuman life is valuable, but it's valuable because it has things like dreams, empathy, etc. That's why we usually don't keep braindead people alive just because we could.