If you have no desire for anything but cheese on your pizza, you will not have any regrets if you order cheese.
(I’m going through the Sequences, myself. Nice to not be the gravedigger every time. Hopefully, this will be a useful contribution, not refuted by the next two posts in the Metaethics sequence.)
Although I appreciated the actual point of the post, I was hung up on one part in the beginning—why can’t I decide to like salad better than cheeseburger? I don’t see any process which would prevent one from over-writing (over time) one’s current preferences. Many people (in the USA at least) make their food decisions based on how many exclamation points are on the front (GLUTEN-FREE!! Less MSG!!!) or other purely psychological reasons (brand name—I’ve talked with many people who prefer one milk over another when I know for a fact that they come from the same company within the same hour of each other), which have nothing to do with their taste receptors. Similarly, pleasure and pain are not just based on nociceptors—would the tattoo-covered extreme man have been so eager to endure the tattooing process when he was a five-year old boy? In these cases, it seems to me, the end (body health (no matter how misguided), and much-desired attention) increases the desirability of the means (unpalatable foods, relatively unnecessary pain and risk of infection). Stockholm Syndrome, anyone?
If I could achieve some wonderful thing by showing in an fMRI that I prefer eating salad and avoiding cheeseburgers (say, a million dollars or a free mind-upload, not just reduced risk of heart disease), I’ll be first in line.
“If I could achieve some wonderful thing by showing in an fMRI that I prefer eating salad and avoiding cheeseburgers, I’ll be first in line.”
It was “make salad taste better than cheeseburgers”, not “prefer to eat salad”. This analogy may be muddled by the fact that tastes can in fact be deliberately changed over time; wherein belief in belief can actually become belief, become reality. But the fact remains that if someone offered you a millions dollars, right now, to truthfully claim you prefer the taste of salad when you in fact did not, you would fail.
I enjoy the sequences in story/dialog form most of all. But all too often the points conveyed in this style seem less significant and helpful to me; typically they are hashing out something that is largely semantics or else describing philosophical tropes.
It doesn’t seem to me that Obert is really a moral objectivist as the duos’ names would suggest—I think their argument is really one of semantics. When he says: “Duties, and should-ness, seem to have a dimension that goes beyond our whims. ”, he is using the word “whim” as a synonym for “want”. Subhan merely has a more inclusive definition of want: “What a brain ultimately decides to do”. It does not seem that Obert would object to the idea that moral constructs are created and stored in the mind, nor would Subhert reject that the brains’ utility function has many differently ordered terms.
The brain sometimes arrives at decisions contrary to immediate whims.
If you have no desire for anything but cheese on your pizza, you will not have any regrets if you order cheese. (I’m going through the Sequences, myself. Nice to not be the gravedigger every time. Hopefully, this will be a useful contribution, not refuted by the next two posts in the Metaethics sequence.) Although I appreciated the actual point of the post, I was hung up on one part in the beginning—why can’t I decide to like salad better than cheeseburger? I don’t see any process which would prevent one from over-writing (over time) one’s current preferences. Many people (in the USA at least) make their food decisions based on how many exclamation points are on the front (GLUTEN-FREE!! Less MSG!!!) or other purely psychological reasons (brand name—I’ve talked with many people who prefer one milk over another when I know for a fact that they come from the same company within the same hour of each other), which have nothing to do with their taste receptors. Similarly, pleasure and pain are not just based on nociceptors—would the tattoo-covered extreme man have been so eager to endure the tattooing process when he was a five-year old boy? In these cases, it seems to me, the end (body health (no matter how misguided), and much-desired attention) increases the desirability of the means (unpalatable foods, relatively unnecessary pain and risk of infection). Stockholm Syndrome, anyone? If I could achieve some wonderful thing by showing in an fMRI that I prefer eating salad and avoiding cheeseburgers (say, a million dollars or a free mind-upload, not just reduced risk of heart disease), I’ll be first in line.
“If I could achieve some wonderful thing by showing in an fMRI that I prefer eating salad and avoiding cheeseburgers, I’ll be first in line.”
It was “make salad taste better than cheeseburgers”, not “prefer to eat salad”. This analogy may be muddled by the fact that tastes can in fact be deliberately changed over time; wherein belief in belief can actually become belief, become reality. But the fact remains that if someone offered you a millions dollars, right now, to truthfully claim you prefer the taste of salad when you in fact did not, you would fail.
I enjoy the sequences in story/dialog form most of all. But all too often the points conveyed in this style seem less significant and helpful to me; typically they are hashing out something that is largely semantics or else describing philosophical tropes.
It doesn’t seem to me that Obert is really a moral objectivist as the duos’ names would suggest—I think their argument is really one of semantics. When he says: “Duties, and should-ness, seem to have a dimension that goes beyond our whims. ”, he is using the word “whim” as a synonym for “want”. Subhan merely has a more inclusive definition of want: “What a brain ultimately decides to do”. It does not seem that Obert would object to the idea that moral constructs are created and stored in the mind, nor would Subhert reject that the brains’ utility function has many differently ordered terms.
The brain sometimes arrives at decisions contrary to immediate whims.