It is as if we were stuck in a kind of awkward middle ground
Throughout this post I was thinking about the phrase “starting from the middle” as where we are, with neither perfect knowledge of reasoning nor of our goals, but having something to go on and having to build from there.
It also reminds me of Abram’s post An Orthodox Case Against Utility Functions which is about getting started from the point of view of an agent, created in motion, not the point of view of the universe (or some other omniscient sort of position).
You might enjoy Nozick’s Invariances which takes a similar approach to the Is-Ought problem in claiming that the ontological assumptions of the problem as stated are incoherent. We don’t have firm Is’s and firm Oughts we need to bridge. We already are the bridge (of theseus) one end of which is built from heuristics that return Is-like answers, and one end of which is built from heuristics that return Ought-like answers.
I believe Nozick was partially responding to The View from Nowhere.
Throughout this post I was thinking about the phrase “starting from the middle” as where we are, with neither perfect knowledge of reasoning nor of our goals, but having something to go on and having to build from there.
It also reminds me of Abram’s post An Orthodox Case Against Utility Functions which is about getting started from the point of view of an agent, created in motion, not the point of view of the universe (or some other omniscient sort of position).
You might enjoy Nozick’s Invariances which takes a similar approach to the Is-Ought problem in claiming that the ontological assumptions of the problem as stated are incoherent. We don’t have firm Is’s and firm Oughts we need to bridge. We already are the bridge (of theseus) one end of which is built from heuristics that return Is-like answers, and one end of which is built from heuristics that return Ought-like answers.
I believe Nozick was partially responding to The View from Nowhere.
That sounds like a good response to the Is-Ought problem.
Yeah thank you for that connection Ben. It seems like a true connection to me.