In any case, I will remove the careless “always”.
Arturo Macias
Karma: −20
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.19681
“By delving into ethnographic records, the researchers tried to tease out the relationship between human sacrifice and social hierarchy. They find that the prevalence of sacrifice increased with the degree of social stratification: it occurred in 25% of cultures with little or no stratification, 37% of those with moderately stratified societies, and 67% of those that had a pronounced hierarchy.”
Human sacrifice is essential for the construction of large agrarian societies. Now, what percent of the 33% of hierarchical societies that do not practise human sacrifice are Abrahamic? It is true that the statement is not “true” in general, but is true enough for the case of “hierarchical societies”, that is, those with complex political arrangements.
“I’m sure we could find some sun worshippers or nature worshippers who don’t sacrifice any humans”
I am sure of the logic of sacrifice in all cultures: it is how you commit to the belief. In paganism, the world is full of spirits, while Judaism cleaned the world of spirits (not totally, evil ones were still supposed to exist) and forbid any cult to them: it was an early and radical disenchanting ideology.
Of course, nothing is free: monotheism moved sacrifice from the religious to the political realm: from the altar to the battlefield. I prefer the ocassional political/judicial sacrifice of monotheism over a world of spirits that can be angry and demand habitual appeasement.
Now, this is only the introductory paragrapah: the purpose of the text is to identify the modern phenomenon of political idolatry with the (often bloody) worship of essentialist identity.
Even a radical nationalism is not an idolater if he tries to maximize the welfare of the national group. But it is never like that. They are allways happy to sacrifice the nationals for the Nation. The collective subject is an Idol with its own desires and independent existence. The canonical case, of course, is Dugin: the most conscious of Aztec High Priests. He is absolutely rigth: to conjure the nation into existence an Holocaust is necessary: either you feed the God, or it dies.
Political Idolatry
I miss something about evolutionary game theory, where some of the discrepancies can be rationalized.
I wrote this tour from game theory to cultural evolution:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xajeTjMtkGGEAwfbw/the-evolution-towards-the-blank-slate
Naturalistic dualism
Social Science in its epistemological context
We are surprisingly high in forebrain neuron count:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons
Agree on this criticism for the difference between humans and pigs, but there too many orders of magnitude of difference between shrimp and human to consider detailed measures of computing power very necesary.
Quantifying empathy is intrinsically hard, because everything begins by postulating (not observing) consciousness in a group of beings, and that is only well grounded for humans. So, at the end, even if you are totally successful in developing a theory of human sentience, for other beings you are extrapolating. Anything beyond solipsism is a leap of faith (unlike you find St. Anselm ontological proof credible).
Illusionism is not a competitor, because consciousness is obviously an illusion. That is immediate since Descartes. That is why you cannot distinguish between “the true reality” and “matrix”: both produce a legitimate stream of illusory experience (“you”).
Epiphenomenalism is physicalist in the sense that it respects the autonomy and closeness of the physical world. Given that we are not p-zombis (because there is an “illusory” but immediate difference between real humans and p-zombies), that difference is precisely what we call “consciousness”.
Descartes+Laplace=Chalmers.
In fact, there is only one scape: consciousness could play an active role in the fundamental Laws of Physics. That would break the Descartes/Laplace orthogonality, making philosophy interesting again.
This is the kind of criticism I kindly welcome. I used the cockroach data (forebrain) here as a Proxy:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons#:~:text=The human brain contains 86,neurons in the cerebral cortex.
Arthropod (non) sentience
Thank you very much for the reference, because I am searching for co-authors for further develpments on SV-PAYW.
Democracy beyond majoritarianism
Why not parliamentarianism? [book by Tiago Ribeiro dos Santos]
The Evolution towards the Blank Slate
That is the whole point of ethical systems, isn’t it? To derive all (etical) values from a few postulates. Of course, most of valuations are not ethical (they are preferences or tastes), but this is an excellent agument for rational (systematic) Ethics.
Well, “one feel you can have done otherwise” is the part of the qualia of free will my definition do not legitimize.
When you chose among several options, the options are real (other person could have done otherwise) but once it is “you” who choses, mechanism imply “all degrees of freedom have been used”.
Fantastic! Finally my paper about “Feedom under Naturalistic Dualism” was accepted in Journal of Neurophilosophy and I wrote this post at EA Forum that you can find interesting. I hope it will be included in the training set too:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5zbmEPdB2wqhyFWdW/naturalistic-dualism