It has been designed by many people all over the world (but mostly in Asia) over thousands of years through extensive trial and error. I think some of the methods are very good and have tried them out myself. I persevered with my favorite technique and it produced fascinating results for me. Mysticism has the advantage over Western philosophy in that it allows a practitioner to observe ethics unfolding in the mind directly. This brings ethics down from philosophical word games into the empirical reality of consciousness.
Trial and error assumes an objective, measurable loss function. What is the loss function here, and why is it relevant to ethics? Also, can you give some examples how this method allows solving questions debated in Western philosophy, such as population ethics, the moral status of animals, time discount or nosy preferences?
What is the loss function here, and why is it relevant to ethics?
This is a very complicated question and lots of other people have written about it already, in depth and in better places than eight comments deep into an online forum. If you are sufficiently interested in this subject, I recommend reading a book by Dharma Dan, Brad Warner, Thích Nhất Hạnh or the 14th Dalai Lama. You may prefer Dharma Dan to the others as he is the most secular of this group.
If you are curious about how ethics can exist without a loss function, you may find interesting The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict. (I listed this book in the footnotes to the original article.) This book describes a real-world ethical system where internal coherence (an abstract well-defined loss function) was not a value. I hope in the future to write a future about Daoism that expands upon this idea.
It has been designed by many people all over the world (but mostly in Asia) over thousands of years through extensive trial and error. I think some of the methods are very good and have tried them out myself. I persevered with my favorite technique and it produced fascinating results for me. Mysticism has the advantage over Western philosophy in that it allows a practitioner to observe ethics unfolding in the mind directly. This brings ethics down from philosophical word games into the empirical reality of consciousness.
Trial and error assumes an objective, measurable loss function. What is the loss function here, and why is it relevant to ethics? Also, can you give some examples how this method allows solving questions debated in Western philosophy, such as population ethics, the moral status of animals, time discount or nosy preferences?
This is a very complicated question and lots of other people have written about it already, in depth and in better places than eight comments deep into an online forum. If you are sufficiently interested in this subject, I recommend reading a book by Dharma Dan, Brad Warner, Thích Nhất Hạnh or the 14th Dalai Lama. You may prefer Dharma Dan to the others as he is the most secular of this group.
If you are curious about how ethics can exist without a loss function, you may find interesting The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict. (I listed this book in the footnotes to the original article.) This book describes a real-world ethical system where internal coherence (an abstract well-defined loss function) was not a value. I hope in the future to write a future about Daoism that expands upon this idea.