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It was Gottfried Leibniz who envisaged the end of philosophic disputes, replacing argument with calculation. "if controversies were to arise, there would be no

It was Gottfried Leibniz who envisaged the end of philosophic disputes, replacing argument with calculation. "if controversies were to arise, there would be no more need of disputation between two philosophers than between two calculators. For it would suffice for them to take their pencils in their hands and to sit down at the abacus, and say to each other (and if they so wish also to a friend called to help): Let us calculate."

soulofmischief 2y ago
If only. Ethics are reached via consensus. Two calculators can indeed produce different results if the axioms supporting them differ. And good luck calculating some of these axioms, such as "Why is it my duty not to kill someone?" You could argue, "Well in the end, a society enabling such behavior at scale would be no society at all," to which one might reply, "I have no interest in letting others do as I do.", and you can't calculate away violent sociopaths. The rest of us derive our principles from functioning mammalian emotional circuits, but at some level we rest our case on subjective axioms.
- glenstein 2y ago
  >Ethics are reached via consensus This is probably too big a topic for a whole side-branch on this, but modern meta-ethics teaches a range of possible approaches. Some notions of ethics are relativist, and are about the fact that moral norms are produced by some given society. But under some constructions that's just a procedural truism rather than a position on the content or the nature of morality itself. Then you have moral realism, a perfectly respected position, which can encompass things like utilitariansim and other ism's. And this might seem silly derail, and I'm trying not to, but this is important at the end of the day, because "ethics is reached via consensus" can mean a lot of things that cash out with completely different practical implications. It's the difference between, for instance, deciding we need to be consensus oriented and vote, or be research oriented and concerned with deepening our scientific understanding of things like insect consciousness and whether the physical effects of sleep deprivation fall under the traditional definition of torture. >And good luck calculating some of these axioms Not wrong, they can easily get computationally intractable. So I think one has to account to some degree for uncertainty. Here again, I worry that the intended upshot is supposed to be that we simply give up or treat the project of moral understanding like a cosmically impossible non-starter. I like to think there's a middle ground between where we presently stand and the hypothetical future where we've got perfect knowledge.
- kennysoona 2y ago
  Those axioms can still be evaluated, quantified and compared, and eventually calculated.
  - yifanl 2y ago
    Based on what criteria? A set of meta-axioms?
    - kennysoona 2y ago
      No, no meta axioms. Just by quantifying whatever we can as much as possible to be as objective as possible.
      - Mr-Frog 2y ago
        My gut still tells me this relies on a human-defined optimization metric.
      - soulofmischief 2y ago
        "as possible" means an incomplete system that still relies on assumed axioms.
        kennysoona 2y ago
        Maybe. I don't think so though. I think everything can be quantified and qualified.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        soulofmischief 2y ago
        Unless you can provide a proof, it remains conjecture.
      - numpad0 2y ago
        I think what this branch of comments is trying to do is to reinvent `ideology` as a word.
- lo_zamoyski 2y ago
  > Ethics are reached via consensus. Absolutely not! This is cultural relativism, and frankly, it would be circular: how exactly are we converging on a consensus if not from some preexisting sense of the good? The only defensible objective basis for the good is the nature of a thing and what actualizes the potentials determined by that nature, thus actualizing the thing as the kind of thing it is. Morality, only possible for things that have the capacity to comprehend their options for action (intellect) and choose freely among them (will) on the basis of that understanding, therefore concerns the question of whether an act performed by a thing furthers or frustrates the actualization of that thing. By cutting off my arm for no proportionate reason, I do an immoral thing, because it is my nature to have that arm, but if I have gangrene in that arm that threatens my life, then removing the gangrene with the undesirable side effect of losing an arm is morally justifiable, even if the loss of the arm is not good per se. Murdering a human being is gravely immoral, because it directly contradicts my nature as a social human being in a very profound and profoundly self-destructive way. However, killing a would-be murderer in defense of my life or that of another is a morally very good deed; it is in accord with my social nature, and indeed can be said to actualize it more fully in some respect. > The rest of us derive our principles from functioning mammalian emotional circuits Please refrain from making such silly pseudoscientific and pseudophilosophical statements. That being said, calculation is insufficient, because such calculation is formal: it explicitly excludes the conceptual content of propositions. But concepts are the material "carriers" of comprehension of what things are. We can also analyze concepts. Now, we can say that we can calculate a formal deduction according to formal rules, but we cannot calculate a concept or its analytical products. This is the produce of abstraction from concreta. Formal systems abstract from these. They are blind to conceptual content, on purpose. And having used a formalism to derive a conclusion, we must interpret the result, that is, we must reassign concepts to symbols that stand in for them. So formal systems are useful tools, but they are tools.
  - kazinator 2y ago
    "reached via" is not the same thing as "derived from".
  - numpad0 2y ago
    I've never thought that cultural relativism is supposed to be bad/wrong - I thought that kinds of thinking is superstitious, a bit racist, and are an undesirable strong basis for many kinds of hostilities in the world that it shouldn't be a formal majority point of view. One cannot realistically construct the ethics procedurally and reproducibly from blank slate, so holding a false beliefs that one can or do have such set of "scientific" ethical standards only justify genociding oppositions. Ethics is just half-broken loose set of heuristics developed and optimized evolutionarily. It probably can't even be properly quantized into text. It's nothing that stands up to scientific computational scrutiny. And there we step into cultural relativism as a principle; there are lots of behaviors we humans show as "ethical" acts that sometimes seem random and not universal, that also seem to work where it is done, and maybe not work where it is not done, so you can't say which one is it.
franktankbank 2y ago
Although, demanding even a shred of self-consistency goes a long way in short circuiting bad argumentation.
- dmos62 2y ago
  I have a pet theory that most inefficiency is about self-consistency (or lack thereof), whether that's in human-human or human-machine communications (e.g. program code).
dmos62 2y ago
I wonder if anyone else thought that that's how most of the world worked when they were a kid. I thought that most people would reason through everything, and if they couldn't, they would take it home as sort of homework and finish it there.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bloomingkales 2y ago
Well, we can have AI do what we do but it will never be tied to an emotion. You can feel a lot just adding 2+2 (maybe someone held a gun to your head once). What does philosophy say about philosophy without emotion? What use is it to us without our human context? The philosophy of a tiger is not relevant to me mostly because I don't feel most of the things a tiger feels.
gnatman 2y ago
“That’s nice little idea you have there. Be a shame if it turned out to be incomplete…” - Kurt Gödel
- strogonoff 2y ago
  I wonder if Gödel’s incompleteness can somehow map to the map vs. territory distinction. The impossibility to exhaustively and precisely put humanity in words, like the impossibility to have provably correct and complete model of reality, is like the impossibility to have a fully precise map. The biggest danger is elevating the newly created map to the position of your new, much more simplistic, territory that supersedes the original one, with all of its quirks and fidelity.

soulofmischief 2y ago

If only. Ethics are reached via consensus. Two calculators can indeed produce different results if the axioms supporting them differ. And good luck calculating some of these axioms, such as "Why is it my duty not to kill someone?" You could argue, "Well in the end, a society enabling such behavior at scale would be no society at all," to which one might reply, "I have no interest in letting others do as I do.", and you can't calculate away violent sociopaths. The rest of us derive our principles from functioning mammalian emotional circuits, but at some level we rest our case on subjective axioms.

glenstein 2y ago
>Ethics are reached via consensus This is probably too big a topic for a whole side-branch on this, but modern meta-ethics teaches a range of possible approaches. Some notions of ethics are relativist, and are about the fact that moral norms are produced by some given society. But under some constructions that's just a procedural truism rather than a position on the content or the nature of morality itself. Then you have moral realism, a perfectly respected position, which can encompass things like utilitariansim and other ism's. And this might seem silly derail, and I'm trying not to, but this is important at the end of the day, because "ethics is reached via consensus" can mean a lot of things that cash out with completely different practical implications. It's the difference between, for instance, deciding we need to be consensus oriented and vote, or be research oriented and concerned with deepening our scientific understanding of things like insect consciousness and whether the physical effects of sleep deprivation fall under the traditional definition of torture. >And good luck calculating some of these axioms Not wrong, they can easily get computationally intractable. So I think one has to account to some degree for uncertainty. Here again, I worry that the intended upshot is supposed to be that we simply give up or treat the project of moral understanding like a cosmically impossible non-starter. I like to think there's a middle ground between where we presently stand and the hypothetical future where we've got perfect knowledge.
kennysoona 2y ago
Those axioms can still be evaluated, quantified and compared, and eventually calculated.
- yifanl 2y ago
  Based on what criteria? A set of meta-axioms?
  - kennysoona 2y ago
    No, no meta axioms. Just by quantifying whatever we can as much as possible to be as objective as possible.
    - Mr-Frog 2y ago
      My gut still tells me this relies on a human-defined optimization metric.
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      "as possible" means an incomplete system that still relies on assumed axioms.
      - kennysoona 2y ago
        Maybe. I don't think so though. I think everything can be quantified and qualified.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        soulofmischief 2y ago
        Unless you can provide a proof, it remains conjecture.
    - numpad0 2y ago
      I think what this branch of comments is trying to do is to reinvent `ideology` as a word.
lo_zamoyski 2y ago
> Ethics are reached via consensus. Absolutely not! This is cultural relativism, and frankly, it would be circular: how exactly are we converging on a consensus if not from some preexisting sense of the good? The only defensible objective basis for the good is the nature of a thing and what actualizes the potentials determined by that nature, thus actualizing the thing as the kind of thing it is. Morality, only possible for things that have the capacity to comprehend their options for action (intellect) and choose freely among them (will) on the basis of that understanding, therefore concerns the question of whether an act performed by a thing furthers or frustrates the actualization of that thing. By cutting off my arm for no proportionate reason, I do an immoral thing, because it is my nature to have that arm, but if I have gangrene in that arm that threatens my life, then removing the gangrene with the undesirable side effect of losing an arm is morally justifiable, even if the loss of the arm is not good per se. Murdering a human being is gravely immoral, because it directly contradicts my nature as a social human being in a very profound and profoundly self-destructive way. However, killing a would-be murderer in defense of my life or that of another is a morally very good deed; it is in accord with my social nature, and indeed can be said to actualize it more fully in some respect. > The rest of us derive our principles from functioning mammalian emotional circuits Please refrain from making such silly pseudoscientific and pseudophilosophical statements. That being said, calculation is insufficient, because such calculation is formal: it explicitly excludes the conceptual content of propositions. But concepts are the material "carriers" of comprehension of what things are. We can also analyze concepts. Now, we can say that we can calculate a formal deduction according to formal rules, but we cannot calculate a concept or its analytical products. This is the produce of abstraction from concreta. Formal systems abstract from these. They are blind to conceptual content, on purpose. And having used a formalism to derive a conclusion, we must interpret the result, that is, we must reassign concepts to symbols that stand in for them. So formal systems are useful tools, but they are tools.
- kazinator 2y ago
  "reached via" is not the same thing as "derived from".
- numpad0 2y ago
  I've never thought that cultural relativism is supposed to be bad/wrong - I thought that kinds of thinking is superstitious, a bit racist, and are an undesirable strong basis for many kinds of hostilities in the world that it shouldn't be a formal majority point of view. One cannot realistically construct the ethics procedurally and reproducibly from blank slate, so holding a false beliefs that one can or do have such set of "scientific" ethical standards only justify genociding oppositions. Ethics is just half-broken loose set of heuristics developed and optimized evolutionarily. It probably can't even be properly quantized into text. It's nothing that stands up to scientific computational scrutiny. And there we step into cultural relativism as a principle; there are lots of behaviors we humans show as "ethical" acts that sometimes seem random and not universal, that also seem to work where it is done, and maybe not work where it is not done, so you can't say which one is it.

franktankbank 2y ago

Although, demanding even a shred of self-consistency goes a long way in short circuiting bad argumentation.

dmos62 2y ago
I have a pet theory that most inefficiency is about self-consistency (or lack thereof), whether that's in human-human or human-machine communications (e.g. program code).

dmos62 2y ago

I wonder if anyone else thought that that's how most of the world worked when they were a kid. I thought that most people would reason through everything, and if they couldn't, they would take it home as sort of homework and finish it there.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

bloomingkales 2y ago

Well, we can have AI do what we do but it will never be tied to an emotion. You can feel a lot just adding 2+2 (maybe someone held a gun to your head once). What does philosophy say about philosophy without emotion? What use is it to us without our human context? The philosophy of a tiger is not relevant to me mostly because I don't feel most of the things a tiger feels.

gnatman 2y ago

“That’s nice little idea you have there. Be a shame if it turned out to be incomplete…” - Kurt Gödel

strogonoff 2y ago
I wonder if Gödel’s incompleteness can somehow map to the map vs. territory distinction. The impossibility to exhaustively and precisely put humanity in words, like the impossibility to have provably correct and complete model of reality, is like the impossibility to have a fully precise map. The biggest danger is elevating the newly created map to the position of your new, much more simplistic, territory that supersedes the original one, with all of its quirks and fidelity.