Maybe don’t restrict “understand” to “be able to model and predict”.
If you want “rational” to include moral, then you’re not actually disagreeing with LessWrong about rationality (the thing), but rather about “rationality” (the word).
Likewise if you want “understanding” to also include “empathic understanding” (suffering when other people suffer, taking joy when other people take joy), you’re not actually disagreeing about understanding (the thing) with people who want to use the word to mean “modelling and predicting” you’re disagreeing with them about “understanding” (the word).
Are all your disagreements purely linguistic ones? From the comments I’ve read of you so far, they seem to be so.
ArisKatsaris, it’s possible to be a meta-ethical anti-realist and still endorse a much richer conception of what understanding entails than mere formal modeling and prediction. For example, if you want to understand what it’s like to be a bat, then you want to know what the textures of echolocatory qualia are like. In fact, any cognitive agent that doesn’t understand the character of echolocatory qualia-space does not understand bat-minds. More radically, some of us want to understand qualia-spaces that have not been recruited by natural selection to play any information-signalling role at all.
I have argued that in practice, instrumental rationality cannot be maintained seprately from epistemic rationality, and that epistemic rationality could lead to moral objectivism, as many philosophers have argued. I don’t think that those arguments are refuted by stipulatively defining “rationality” as “nothing to do with morality”.
If you want “rational” to include moral, then you’re not actually disagreeing with LessWrong about rationality (the thing), but rather about “rationality” (the word).
Likewise if you want “understanding” to also include “empathic understanding” (suffering when other people suffer, taking joy when other people take joy), you’re not actually disagreeing about understanding (the thing) with people who want to use the word to mean “modelling and predicting” you’re disagreeing with them about “understanding” (the word).
Are all your disagreements purely linguistic ones? From the comments I’ve read of you so far, they seem to be so.
ArisKatsaris, it’s possible to be a meta-ethical anti-realist and still endorse a much richer conception of what understanding entails than mere formal modeling and prediction. For example, if you want to understand what it’s like to be a bat, then you want to know what the textures of echolocatory qualia are like. In fact, any cognitive agent that doesn’t understand the character of echolocatory qualia-space does not understand bat-minds. More radically, some of us want to understand qualia-spaces that have not been recruited by natural selection to play any information-signalling role at all.
I have argued that in practice, instrumental rationality cannot be maintained seprately from epistemic rationality, and that epistemic rationality could lead to moral objectivism, as many philosophers have argued. I don’t think that those arguments are refuted by stipulatively defining “rationality” as “nothing to do with morality”.