I think I disagree with the first part (that we can’t understand the idea of something doing things that feel bad rather than feel good, or that there are obvious reasons why this is impossible in principle), but I won’t argue that for two reasons. First because that would probably end up being a very time consuming discussion, and second because, as I said, I think I can make my argument even if I grant your point.
Regarding your three points:
It sounds like you are saying that there is a balance of good and evil in human life which is basically equal, so that overall life is neutral. If this is the case, it would certainly make sense to say that the universe is neutral as well. But I disagree that the overall balance is neutral, and I think that most people disagree. Most people have a strong preference to live, rather than to die, even in a painless way. This implies that they think the value of the rest of their life is significantly higher than zero. This suggests that you are undervaluing positive experiences and overemphasizing negative experiences, compared to the values that most people place on those. And I doubt that in practice you personally think your life is worthless on balance.
When I say that the universe is good, I do not just mean that life or experience is overall good. If that needs additional justification, I will do that in addressing the third point.
I agree that a cause does not always have the properties of the effect. But goodness has a particular meaning which affects the issue. Without trying to give a formal definition, saying that something is good certainly means something like “this is a desirable state of affairs,” and likewise saying that something is bad would mean something undesirable. But then if a cause brings about a good effect, it brings about a desirable state of affairs. And if the thing was desirable, bringing it about was desirable, and so there is reason to call the cause good as well, even though it still doesn’t mean exactly the same thing (to call the thing good and to call its cause good.)
I don’t think my first part says quite what you say it says, but never mind that since you’ve agreed not to contest it :-).
On good versus neutral versus bad, and wanting to live: wanting and liking are different things, and I think there are (alas) plenty of people who feel that their life contains more bad than good but still have no wish to die. (And, also alas, some who admit that their life contains more good than bad but do want to die, at least some of the time.) No, I don’t think my life is worthless on balance. I think I have an unusually good life. [EDITED to add: And I expect a lot of other people here on LW have unusually good lives too. It’s a group selected for high intelligence (almost necessary to find much LW material interesting), reasonable amounts of leisure time (else we’d be doing other things), not being overwhelmed with other concerns (else again we’d be doing other things), easy access to the internet (since that’s where LW is), membership in a somewhat-dominant culture (because LW is anglophone and founded by people in the US), etc. None of these things is universal here, none of them is either necessary or sufficient for a good life, but they all tend to be characteristic of LW participants and they all tend to go along with a more pleasant life.]
On causes and effects: if by “good” you mean only “bringing about more desirable than undesirable effects, on balance” then I am, at least provisionally, prepared to agree that if an effect is good then that’s evidence for the goodness of each of its causes. But it seems to me that this is a much weaker sense of “good” than the one usually intended by people who say that God is “good”. Suppose I have a child (as in fact I do) and that I alternate between treating her kindly and beating her (as in fact I do not). If I do her more good than harm, overall, does this justify calling me “good”? Of course not.
What does your argument from goodness of experience really come down to? Only this, I think: “The universe has in it more good experiences than bad, perhaps just because of the logic of evolution. So whatever, if anything, caused our universe to exist may have the property of tending to produce more good experiences than bad. The god in whom I believe is supposed to have that property, so this imbalance between good and bad experiences is evidence for that god”. I hope it’s clear that if so it’s very weak evidence.
I basically agree with what you said about wanting and liking. That’s one reason why it’s easy for me to imagine a situation where I constantly do things that feel awful and avoid the pleasant ones. Because to some extent that already happens. But life is not even close to being like that as a whole.
I also agree that people on LW are likely to have better lives on average than people in general, and also that at least some people would say that overall there is more bad than good in their lives, while still not wanting to commit suicide or anything like that. But I very much doubt that this is even close to a majority of people, even in very poor countries or in a historical sense. I realize I could be wrong about this and that (if so) someone could prove it with the proper statistics. But this is my current sense of the situation.
Regarding calling the causes good, that is one reason why I said it was a distraction (relative to this argument) to talk about God. Because normally when people say “God,” they think of a person, and in fact a particular person, with the result that instead of talking about some particular point, people are actually discussing whether or not the doctrines of someone’s religion are true or false as a whole.
In any case, as you point out, saying that someone is a “good person,” has a particular meaning, certainly more than saying that overall the person causes more good than bad. But in that way there is no contradiction in someone being a good thing but a bad person, because “good thing” and “good person” mean two different things.
I agree with your summary of the argument, at least as far as it goes.
Well, if you detach your argumentation about good versus bad experience from talk of “God”, then all you’re left with is: People have more good than bad experiences on the whole, so if the universe has causes then they are more likely to be such as to generally produce (ultimately) more good than bad experiences, than to be such as to generally produce (ultimately) more bad than good experiences.
Which is fair enough, but I’m sure originally this was being proposed as evidence for belief in a good god, and it really doesn’t seem to me to offer more than a tiny amount (and, further, in so far as it does the highly mixed character of human experience seems to provide at least as much evidence against the perfectly good gods of various religions).
Actually, that wasn’t how I meant it even originally (even if in fact it is weak evidence for that). I suppose it wasn’t unreasonable for you to understand it that way because I used the word “benevolence,” and in reply to a comment about whether God is good or not, but in fact I was only objecting to the implied claim that the laws of physics (and therefore whatever causes them) are overall absolutely neutral, and I used the word benevolence because you used it.
I agree with you that there is good evidence against the idea of God as a perfectly good person, in a literal sense, especially if you understand that in the sense that God is someone who is supposed to look at every particular thing which is happening and decide whether or not it’s a good idea to allow it to happen or not. It seems very likely that no such thing is happening.
I was only objecting to the implied claim that the laws of physics [...] are overall absolutely neutral
Oh, OK! But in that case I wonder whether there’s a miscommunication. I forget who was claiming that the laws of physics are “neutral”, but what I would mean if I made such a claim is simply that nothing in those laws is about justice or charity or benevolence or honesty or anything of the kind. Of course it might turn out that the laws of physics have consequences of which we morally approve (e.g., living things tending to do things that lead to good rather than bad experiences) or disapprove (e.g., living things competing ruthlessly against one another much of the time), and if you believe in gods and devils and the like then you might think that some of those consequences are actually “design features” rather than emergent coincidences, but the laws themselves simply don’t operate at the same level as moral considerations do.
It seems unlikely to me that anyone here was deliberately claiming, or implying, that the laws of physics can’t have any consequences to which we attach moral weight.
There was probably some miscommunication, perhaps because when people talk about things they have certain interests. This can happen in a completely non-truth related way, as e.g. a website like Answers in Genesis is not interested in discovering the truth, but in arguing for creationism without any regard for reality. However, even when people want to know or discuss the truth they still have particular motivations which affect the discussion. So for example if someone is interested at the moment in thinking about one particular aspect of reality, he is more likely to interpret other people’s statements as being relevant to that consideration, even if they are in fact irrelevant or less relevant than he would like.
But I’m not sure it’s completely an issue of miscommunication because I’m not very comfortable with your explanation here either. Let me try to summarize your comment before I try to explain why I have a problem with it:
The laws of physics that we know and use are mathematical laws about mass and force and so on. It is obvious that these do not contain anything about justice etc.
It turns out that these laws have various consequences which have moral importance for us, some good and some bad.
But the laws “don’t operate at the same level,” even if someone might suppose that the above good or bad consequences are the result of someone’s good or bad intentions. If they are an argument for such good or bad intentions, they are a fairly weak argument for it.
(I realize that there is more here than you said in the comment I’m replying to, but I’m summarizing also based on our previous discussion.)
I agree with all three of these points. However, I still have a problem with your comment as a whole, probably because of this: “you might think that some of these consequences are actually ‘design features’ rather than emergent coincidences.”
It is perfectly obvious that mathematical laws as such are not about morality, and in that sense it is not an interesting question. But it seems unlikely that mathematical laws are the most fundamental causes of the world, because they are abstractions, not realities. So the more interesting question is, if the mathematical laws have other causes, what is the relationship of those causes to morality?
Your statement seems to suggest that either those causes designed morality and human life, or morality is an “emergent coincidence” relative to them, as it is relative to the mathematical laws in themselves. I think this is a false dichotomy. For example, fire makes things hot, and this is neither by design on the part of the fire, nor by emergent coincidence. Of course, you could say that this is because fire is “about” heat, while the laws of physics (and consequently their causes) are presumably not about morality. So if it isn’t by design, it seems to be by coincidence.
I disagree with this conclusion, but there is no way to explain this disagreement without reopening the can of worms I was planning to keep closed. So instead of making that argument as a whole, I’ll do it by talking about a question.
I think that dualism about experience is probably false. For example, some things look orange to me, and some things look blue. I don’t think that it is possible to change that fact without either changing those objects physically, or changing me physically. With the appropriate physical changes on either side, however, it would be possible to make those orange things look blue, and the blue things look orange.
But despite this belief, I think it is a meaningful question to ask, “Why do oranges look orange to me, instead of blue?”, and one that cannot be answered in an explanatory way by reference to those physical causes that would in fact change things so that oranges look blue.
I think it is a meaningful question, one that currently no one can answer. It is possible that no one will ever be able to answer it. And it is possible even that no one can answer it in principle, in the sense that the “answer” is not something intelligible to a human mind.
I do not think that answers that have to do with the structure of the human brain and the mathematical laws of physics do or can answer this question.
I do not think that it is a meaningless question, like “Why I am myself instead of being gjm?” This question is meaningless, not only in the sense that we cannot answer it, but in the sense that there is nothing that is being asked. There is no “I” who had the possibility of being either myself or someone else. It is clear to me that the question about orange and blue is quite different. A world where oranges look blue is a quite different world (unlike the world where I am gjm), and so it is meaningful to ask why we are not in that different world.
I could also make the question into “Why am I conscious at all, instead of being a philosophical zombie?”, even though that might make the opening in the can of worms too wide. Note that saying that philosophical zombies are impossible does not answer the question. I agree that they are impossible, given the brute fact that we are actually conscious. The question is why they are impossible, and something being impossible is not always self-explanatory, and no one has yet explained this particular case. Nor does it explain it to give a lengthy explanation of physical causes which would lead to someone saying words like “I am conscious,” even if he were a philosophical zombie.
The existence of this kind of question, and the impossibility of answering it in any standard way, suggests to me that there is something in the basic causes of laws of physics which has a stronger relationship with consciousness (and probably also good and evil, given how fundamental these are in our experience) than emergent coincidence, but different from design. Thus more like the relationship between fire and heat, although not exactly this relationship either.
It is by no means obvious that the laws of physics could not be about morality or humans. A law to prevent human beings from losing all of their limbs would, if expressed in the same ‘language’ as the other laws, be absurdly long—but any being we could reasonably describe as “omnipotent and omniscient” would have no trouble creating it.
I don’t know if I understand the rest of the parent. Would you like to replace “oranges” with “dresses” and try again? If Martha’s perceptions consisted entirely of connections, - let’s say she could only register differences between the photons arriving from different areas and compare these mathematical differences with other patterns of difference, which may activate other nodes in her network—would she describe anything differently?
I didn’t say it is obvious that there couldn’t be laws of physics about morality or about humans. I said it is obvious that the ones we actually know and use are not about those things.
As for the rest, I’ll adopt the style that Socrates calls “polemical,” and say that “I have given my argument, if you disagree it is up to you to refute it.” Mostly because I didn’t want to get involved in that discussion in the first place.
I think I disagree with the first part (that we can’t understand the idea of something doing things that feel bad rather than feel good, or that there are obvious reasons why this is impossible in principle), but I won’t argue that for two reasons. First because that would probably end up being a very time consuming discussion, and second because, as I said, I think I can make my argument even if I grant your point.
Regarding your three points:
It sounds like you are saying that there is a balance of good and evil in human life which is basically equal, so that overall life is neutral. If this is the case, it would certainly make sense to say that the universe is neutral as well. But I disagree that the overall balance is neutral, and I think that most people disagree. Most people have a strong preference to live, rather than to die, even in a painless way. This implies that they think the value of the rest of their life is significantly higher than zero. This suggests that you are undervaluing positive experiences and overemphasizing negative experiences, compared to the values that most people place on those. And I doubt that in practice you personally think your life is worthless on balance.
When I say that the universe is good, I do not just mean that life or experience is overall good. If that needs additional justification, I will do that in addressing the third point.
I agree that a cause does not always have the properties of the effect. But goodness has a particular meaning which affects the issue. Without trying to give a formal definition, saying that something is good certainly means something like “this is a desirable state of affairs,” and likewise saying that something is bad would mean something undesirable. But then if a cause brings about a good effect, it brings about a desirable state of affairs. And if the thing was desirable, bringing it about was desirable, and so there is reason to call the cause good as well, even though it still doesn’t mean exactly the same thing (to call the thing good and to call its cause good.)
I don’t think my first part says quite what you say it says, but never mind that since you’ve agreed not to contest it :-).
On good versus neutral versus bad, and wanting to live: wanting and liking are different things, and I think there are (alas) plenty of people who feel that their life contains more bad than good but still have no wish to die. (And, also alas, some who admit that their life contains more good than bad but do want to die, at least some of the time.) No, I don’t think my life is worthless on balance. I think I have an unusually good life. [EDITED to add: And I expect a lot of other people here on LW have unusually good lives too. It’s a group selected for high intelligence (almost necessary to find much LW material interesting), reasonable amounts of leisure time (else we’d be doing other things), not being overwhelmed with other concerns (else again we’d be doing other things), easy access to the internet (since that’s where LW is), membership in a somewhat-dominant culture (because LW is anglophone and founded by people in the US), etc. None of these things is universal here, none of them is either necessary or sufficient for a good life, but they all tend to be characteristic of LW participants and they all tend to go along with a more pleasant life.]
On causes and effects: if by “good” you mean only “bringing about more desirable than undesirable effects, on balance” then I am, at least provisionally, prepared to agree that if an effect is good then that’s evidence for the goodness of each of its causes. But it seems to me that this is a much weaker sense of “good” than the one usually intended by people who say that God is “good”. Suppose I have a child (as in fact I do) and that I alternate between treating her kindly and beating her (as in fact I do not). If I do her more good than harm, overall, does this justify calling me “good”? Of course not.
What does your argument from goodness of experience really come down to? Only this, I think: “The universe has in it more good experiences than bad, perhaps just because of the logic of evolution. So whatever, if anything, caused our universe to exist may have the property of tending to produce more good experiences than bad. The god in whom I believe is supposed to have that property, so this imbalance between good and bad experiences is evidence for that god”. I hope it’s clear that if so it’s very weak evidence.
I basically agree with what you said about wanting and liking. That’s one reason why it’s easy for me to imagine a situation where I constantly do things that feel awful and avoid the pleasant ones. Because to some extent that already happens. But life is not even close to being like that as a whole.
I also agree that people on LW are likely to have better lives on average than people in general, and also that at least some people would say that overall there is more bad than good in their lives, while still not wanting to commit suicide or anything like that. But I very much doubt that this is even close to a majority of people, even in very poor countries or in a historical sense. I realize I could be wrong about this and that (if so) someone could prove it with the proper statistics. But this is my current sense of the situation.
Regarding calling the causes good, that is one reason why I said it was a distraction (relative to this argument) to talk about God. Because normally when people say “God,” they think of a person, and in fact a particular person, with the result that instead of talking about some particular point, people are actually discussing whether or not the doctrines of someone’s religion are true or false as a whole.
In any case, as you point out, saying that someone is a “good person,” has a particular meaning, certainly more than saying that overall the person causes more good than bad. But in that way there is no contradiction in someone being a good thing but a bad person, because “good thing” and “good person” mean two different things.
I agree with your summary of the argument, at least as far as it goes.
Well, if you detach your argumentation about good versus bad experience from talk of “God”, then all you’re left with is: People have more good than bad experiences on the whole, so if the universe has causes then they are more likely to be such as to generally produce (ultimately) more good than bad experiences, than to be such as to generally produce (ultimately) more bad than good experiences.
Which is fair enough, but I’m sure originally this was being proposed as evidence for belief in a good god, and it really doesn’t seem to me to offer more than a tiny amount (and, further, in so far as it does the highly mixed character of human experience seems to provide at least as much evidence against the perfectly good gods of various religions).
Actually, that wasn’t how I meant it even originally (even if in fact it is weak evidence for that). I suppose it wasn’t unreasonable for you to understand it that way because I used the word “benevolence,” and in reply to a comment about whether God is good or not, but in fact I was only objecting to the implied claim that the laws of physics (and therefore whatever causes them) are overall absolutely neutral, and I used the word benevolence because you used it.
I agree with you that there is good evidence against the idea of God as a perfectly good person, in a literal sense, especially if you understand that in the sense that God is someone who is supposed to look at every particular thing which is happening and decide whether or not it’s a good idea to allow it to happen or not. It seems very likely that no such thing is happening.
Oh, OK! But in that case I wonder whether there’s a miscommunication. I forget who was claiming that the laws of physics are “neutral”, but what I would mean if I made such a claim is simply that nothing in those laws is about justice or charity or benevolence or honesty or anything of the kind. Of course it might turn out that the laws of physics have consequences of which we morally approve (e.g., living things tending to do things that lead to good rather than bad experiences) or disapprove (e.g., living things competing ruthlessly against one another much of the time), and if you believe in gods and devils and the like then you might think that some of those consequences are actually “design features” rather than emergent coincidences, but the laws themselves simply don’t operate at the same level as moral considerations do.
It seems unlikely to me that anyone here was deliberately claiming, or implying, that the laws of physics can’t have any consequences to which we attach moral weight.
There was probably some miscommunication, perhaps because when people talk about things they have certain interests. This can happen in a completely non-truth related way, as e.g. a website like Answers in Genesis is not interested in discovering the truth, but in arguing for creationism without any regard for reality. However, even when people want to know or discuss the truth they still have particular motivations which affect the discussion. So for example if someone is interested at the moment in thinking about one particular aspect of reality, he is more likely to interpret other people’s statements as being relevant to that consideration, even if they are in fact irrelevant or less relevant than he would like.
But I’m not sure it’s completely an issue of miscommunication because I’m not very comfortable with your explanation here either. Let me try to summarize your comment before I try to explain why I have a problem with it:
The laws of physics that we know and use are mathematical laws about mass and force and so on. It is obvious that these do not contain anything about justice etc.
It turns out that these laws have various consequences which have moral importance for us, some good and some bad.
But the laws “don’t operate at the same level,” even if someone might suppose that the above good or bad consequences are the result of someone’s good or bad intentions. If they are an argument for such good or bad intentions, they are a fairly weak argument for it.
(I realize that there is more here than you said in the comment I’m replying to, but I’m summarizing also based on our previous discussion.)
I agree with all three of these points. However, I still have a problem with your comment as a whole, probably because of this: “you might think that some of these consequences are actually ‘design features’ rather than emergent coincidences.”
It is perfectly obvious that mathematical laws as such are not about morality, and in that sense it is not an interesting question. But it seems unlikely that mathematical laws are the most fundamental causes of the world, because they are abstractions, not realities. So the more interesting question is, if the mathematical laws have other causes, what is the relationship of those causes to morality?
Your statement seems to suggest that either those causes designed morality and human life, or morality is an “emergent coincidence” relative to them, as it is relative to the mathematical laws in themselves. I think this is a false dichotomy. For example, fire makes things hot, and this is neither by design on the part of the fire, nor by emergent coincidence. Of course, you could say that this is because fire is “about” heat, while the laws of physics (and consequently their causes) are presumably not about morality. So if it isn’t by design, it seems to be by coincidence.
I disagree with this conclusion, but there is no way to explain this disagreement without reopening the can of worms I was planning to keep closed. So instead of making that argument as a whole, I’ll do it by talking about a question.
I think that dualism about experience is probably false. For example, some things look orange to me, and some things look blue. I don’t think that it is possible to change that fact without either changing those objects physically, or changing me physically. With the appropriate physical changes on either side, however, it would be possible to make those orange things look blue, and the blue things look orange.
But despite this belief, I think it is a meaningful question to ask, “Why do oranges look orange to me, instead of blue?”, and one that cannot be answered in an explanatory way by reference to those physical causes that would in fact change things so that oranges look blue.
I think it is a meaningful question, one that currently no one can answer. It is possible that no one will ever be able to answer it. And it is possible even that no one can answer it in principle, in the sense that the “answer” is not something intelligible to a human mind.
I do not think that answers that have to do with the structure of the human brain and the mathematical laws of physics do or can answer this question.
I do not think that it is a meaningless question, like “Why I am myself instead of being gjm?” This question is meaningless, not only in the sense that we cannot answer it, but in the sense that there is nothing that is being asked. There is no “I” who had the possibility of being either myself or someone else. It is clear to me that the question about orange and blue is quite different. A world where oranges look blue is a quite different world (unlike the world where I am gjm), and so it is meaningful to ask why we are not in that different world.
I could also make the question into “Why am I conscious at all, instead of being a philosophical zombie?”, even though that might make the opening in the can of worms too wide. Note that saying that philosophical zombies are impossible does not answer the question. I agree that they are impossible, given the brute fact that we are actually conscious. The question is why they are impossible, and something being impossible is not always self-explanatory, and no one has yet explained this particular case. Nor does it explain it to give a lengthy explanation of physical causes which would lead to someone saying words like “I am conscious,” even if he were a philosophical zombie.
The existence of this kind of question, and the impossibility of answering it in any standard way, suggests to me that there is something in the basic causes of laws of physics which has a stronger relationship with consciousness (and probably also good and evil, given how fundamental these are in our experience) than emergent coincidence, but different from design. Thus more like the relationship between fire and heat, although not exactly this relationship either.
It is by no means obvious that the laws of physics could not be about morality or humans. A law to prevent human beings from losing all of their limbs would, if expressed in the same ‘language’ as the other laws, be absurdly long—but any being we could reasonably describe as “omnipotent and omniscient” would have no trouble creating it.
I don’t know if I understand the rest of the parent. Would you like to replace “oranges” with “dresses” and try again? If Martha’s perceptions consisted entirely of connections, - let’s say she could only register differences between the photons arriving from different areas and compare these mathematical differences with other patterns of difference, which may activate other nodes in her network—would she describe anything differently?
I didn’t say it is obvious that there couldn’t be laws of physics about morality or about humans. I said it is obvious that the ones we actually know and use are not about those things.
As for the rest, I’ll adopt the style that Socrates calls “polemical,” and say that “I have given my argument, if you disagree it is up to you to refute it.” Mostly because I didn’t want to get involved in that discussion in the first place.