Actually, I am opposed to the argument of ontology of belief, which is why I was trying to argue that beliefs are encoded states of matter. If I assert that “X is wrong” it must mean I assert “I believe X is wrong” as well. If I assert “I believe X is wrong” but don’t assert “X is wrong”, something’s clearly a miss. As pointed out here, beliefs are reflections of best available estimates about physically existing things. If I do assert that I believe X is wrong but don’t assert that X is wrong, then either I am lying about the belief, or else there’s some muddling of definitions and maybe I mean some local version of X or some local version of “wrong”, or I am unaware of my actual state of beliefs (possibly due to insanity, etc.) But my point is that in a sane person, from that person’s first-person experience, the two statements, “I believe X is wrong” and “X is wrong” contain exactly the same information about the state of my brain. They are the same statement.
My point in all this was that “I believe X is wrong” has the same first-person referent as “X is wrong”. If X = murder, say, and I assert that “murder is wrong”, then once you unpack whatever definitions in terms of physical matter and consequence that I mean by “murder” and “wrong”, you’re left with a pointer to a physical arrangement of matter in my brain that resonates when feature vectors of my sensory input correlate with the pattern that stores “murder” and “wrong” in my brain’s memory. It’s a physical thing. The wrongness of murder is that thing, it isn’t an ontological concept that exists outside my brain as some non-physical attribute of reality. Even though other humans have remarkably similar brain-matter-patterns of wrongness and murder, enough so that the mutual information between the pattern allows effective communication, this doesn’t suddenly cause the idea that murder is wrong to stop being just a local manifestation in my brain and start being a separate idea that many humans share pointers to.
If someone wanted to establish metaethical claims based on the idea that there exist non-physical referents being referred to by common human beliefs, and that this set of referents somehow reflects an inherent property of reality, I think this would be misguided and experimentally either not falsifiable or at the very least unsupported by evidence. I don’t guess that this makes too much practical difference, other than being a sort of Pandora’s box for religious-type reasoning (but what isn’t?).
Actually, I am opposed to the argument of ontology of belief, which is why I was trying to argue that beliefs are encoded states of matter. If I assert that “X is wrong” it must mean I assert “I believe X is wrong” as well. If I assert “I believe X is wrong” but don’t assert “X is wrong”, something’s clearly a miss. As pointed out here, beliefs are reflections of best available estimates about physically existing things. If I do assert that I believe X is wrong but don’t assert that X is wrong, then either I am lying about the belief, or else there’s some muddling of definitions and maybe I mean some local version of X or some local version of “wrong”, or I am unaware of my actual state of beliefs (possibly due to insanity, etc.) But my point is that in a sane person, from that person’s first-person experience, the two statements, “I believe X is wrong” and “X is wrong” contain exactly the same information about the state of my brain. They are the same statement.
My point in all this was that “I believe X is wrong” has the same first-person referent as “X is wrong”. If X = murder, say, and I assert that “murder is wrong”, then once you unpack whatever definitions in terms of physical matter and consequence that I mean by “murder” and “wrong”, you’re left with a pointer to a physical arrangement of matter in my brain that resonates when feature vectors of my sensory input correlate with the pattern that stores “murder” and “wrong” in my brain’s memory. It’s a physical thing. The wrongness of murder is that thing, it isn’t an ontological concept that exists outside my brain as some non-physical attribute of reality. Even though other humans have remarkably similar brain-matter-patterns of wrongness and murder, enough so that the mutual information between the pattern allows effective communication, this doesn’t suddenly cause the idea that murder is wrong to stop being just a local manifestation in my brain and start being a separate idea that many humans share pointers to.
If someone wanted to establish metaethical claims based on the idea that there exist non-physical referents being referred to by common human beliefs, and that this set of referents somehow reflects an inherent property of reality, I think this would be misguided and experimentally either not falsifiable or at the very least unsupported by evidence. I don’t guess that this makes too much practical difference, other than being a sort of Pandora’s box for religious-type reasoning (but what isn’t?).