Forgive me if i’ve misunderstood but I get the impression from your writings here that you believe no claim can be about reality unless there is some physical configuration of the universe, some state that can be described at the quark level, which would count as evidence against that claim. Claims about morality, by such a standard, cannot be about reality.
On a somewhat unrelated note, do you think the critics of logical positivism were wrong? As I read what you have written here it seems like the philosophy you are expounding is more or less the same old logical positivism, just with special emphasis on bayesian updating and (in the case of this post) palatability.
I get the impression from your writings here that you believe no claim can be about reality unless there is some physical configuration of the universe, some state that can be described at the quark level, which would count as evidence against that claim. Claims about morality, by such a standard, cannot be about reality.
They are for me. Morality is about pattern matching algorithms in our brain. That which pings our morality algorithms is moral. That which pings our yummy algorithms is yummy.
Eliezer,
Forgive me if i’ve misunderstood but I get the impression from your writings here that you believe no claim can be about reality unless there is some physical configuration of the universe, some state that can be described at the quark level, which would count as evidence against that claim. Claims about morality, by such a standard, cannot be about reality.
On a somewhat unrelated note, do you think the critics of logical positivism were wrong? As I read what you have written here it seems like the philosophy you are expounding is more or less the same old logical positivism, just with special emphasis on bayesian updating and (in the case of this post) palatability.
They are for me. Morality is about pattern matching algorithms in our brain. That which pings our morality algorithms is moral. That which pings our yummy algorithms is yummy.