Except that chess really does have an objectively correct value systemization, which is “win the game.” “Sitting with paradox” just means, don’t get too attached to partial systemizations. It reminds me of Max Stirner’s egoist philosophy, which emphasized that individuals should not get hung up on partial abstractions or “idées fixées” (honesty, pleasure, success, money, truth, etc.) except perhaps as cheap, heuristic proxies for one’s uber-systematized value of self-interest, but one should instead always keep in mind the overriding abstraction of self-interest and check in periodically as to whether one’s commitment to honesty, pleasure, success, money, truth, or any of these other “spooks” really are promoting one’s self-interest (perhaps yes, perhaps no).
Except that chess really does have an objectively correct value systemization, which is “win the game.”
Your phrasing sounds like you might be saying this as an objection to what I wrote, but I’m not sure how it would contradict my comment.
The same mechanisms can still apply even if the correct systematization is subjective in one case and objective in the second case. Ultimately what matters is that the cognitive system feels that one alternative is better than the other and takes that feeling as feedback for shaping future behavior, and I think that the mechanism which updates on feedback doesn’t really see whether the source of the feedback is something we’d call objective (win or loss at chess) or subjective (whether the resulting outcome was good in terms of the person’s pre-existing values).
“Sitting with paradox” just means, don’t get too attached to partial systemizations.
Yeah, I think that’s a reasonable description of what it means in the context of morality too.
Except that chess really does have an objectively correct value systemization, which is “win the game.” “Sitting with paradox” just means, don’t get too attached to partial systemizations. It reminds me of Max Stirner’s egoist philosophy, which emphasized that individuals should not get hung up on partial abstractions or “idées fixées” (honesty, pleasure, success, money, truth, etc.) except perhaps as cheap, heuristic proxies for one’s uber-systematized value of self-interest, but one should instead always keep in mind the overriding abstraction of self-interest and check in periodically as to whether one’s commitment to honesty, pleasure, success, money, truth, or any of these other “spooks” really are promoting one’s self-interest (perhaps yes, perhaps no).
Your phrasing sounds like you might be saying this as an objection to what I wrote, but I’m not sure how it would contradict my comment.
The same mechanisms can still apply even if the correct systematization is subjective in one case and objective in the second case. Ultimately what matters is that the cognitive system feels that one alternative is better than the other and takes that feeling as feedback for shaping future behavior, and I think that the mechanism which updates on feedback doesn’t really see whether the source of the feedback is something we’d call objective (win or loss at chess) or subjective (whether the resulting outcome was good in terms of the person’s pre-existing values).
Yeah, I think that’s a reasonable description of what it means in the context of morality too.