Balofsky

Karma: −26

Balofsky 23 Mar 2012 3:12 UTC
2 points
in reply to: HonoreDB’s comment on: Ontologial Reductionism and Invisible Dragons
I’ll concede the use of the word genocide, since you’re right: substituting “killing a girl’s entire family in front of her and then enslaving her” sounds just as bad.

The accounts of wars recorded in the books of the Prophets and Writings often describe women and children being killed in war by surrounding nations, such as Babylonia, Persia and Assyria; it was, revoltingly, a common practice. The rule of war laid down in Deuteronomy 20:14 only allows the Jews to kill adult males in the course of war, and forbids the murder of women and children. The exceptions to this rule were the Canaanite nations and the Amalekites; wars against these nations made no exceptions for women and children. This is why Moses needed to give a specific order concerning the Midianites: the Israelite soldiers assumed that the women ought to be spared, in accordance with Deut. 20:14, and Moses basically informed them that the adult women who attempted to sexually engage with Jewish men in pagan rituals should be killed as any other enemy combatants. It should also be noted that Deut. 20:10 requires the Jews to always offer a peace settlement before laying siege or running into battle, including the Canaanites and Amalekites (Numbers 31 describes them doing this with the Midianites), and forbids the killing of any men, women or children if the peace offering is accepted. In the event the offer is turned down, it is still forbidden to surround the entire enemy camp, and anyone who wishes to flee must be allowed to flee unharmed.

I’d be lying if I were to claim to be entirely at peace with all this: I am not. But evidence for the assertion that the Torah views violence and war as okay, rather than something to be diminished gradually, still seems lacking. The hope for the eventual abolition of war, and for peace between nations, is repeated far too frequently and clearly in the Prophets for the assertion to hold, and the assertion clashes with how most Jews have historically felt about unnecessary violence, beyond their very early, formative period of their history.

Balofsky 23 Mar 2012 1:33 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: RolfAndreassen’s comment on: Ontologial Reductionism and Invisible Dragons
I think you’re partially right. If a certain ethical code is chosen simply because it is regarded as having a divine source, there would be something necessarily nihilistic in giving the said source a positive weighting. However, it would only deny rationality itself as having any intrinsic value: but if the super-intellectual divine has absolute, intrinsic value simply as a part of its definition, the ethical code deriving from it would as well, and certain actions would become intrinsically desirable.

My point here is that there are many people who regard themselves as abiding by material reductionism as an overall worldview, but who simultaneously admit that the core of morality is essentially non-rational (Ex. the “void” described in the 13 Virtues of Rationality), and this is not internally consistent. My criticism is that attempts to answer ethical questions from a purely rational standpoint usually yield incorrect conclusions, when questions concerning the nature and origin of that non-rational component are removed from the equation.

Balofsky 22 Mar 2012 2:28 UTC
1 point
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Ontologial Reductionism and Invisible Dragons
-Regarding Maimonides, it should be noted that he considered such negative knowledge to be the product of positively acquired knowledge; it’s the same as what I mentioned in the article on yedias hashelilah. This is why he cited 25 propositions from Aristotle in the Guide for the Perplexed, as supports for his negative theology.

-I cede your point about many rabbis not being pro-empirical; the Rabban Gamliel example is a good one. However, I’ll add that very few Gaonim or Rishonim were willing to flatly deny clear empirical evidence, and were generally just fine admitting that many of the Talmud’s scientific claims were incorrect. Also, I’m not aware of many rabbinic authorities who have poskened on halacha on the basis of non-empirical scientific claims.

Balofsky 22 Mar 2012 1:52 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Ontologial Reductionism and Invisible Dragons
I’ll put my comments into two parts, too:

-The reference in Kings II to the “Scroll of the Law” being rediscovered in the ruins of the Temple, refers to the Torah scroll that was considered to have been written by Moses himself personally and placed in the side of the Ark, described towards the end of Deuteronomy. The rediscovery in the Temple ruins by Hilkiah refers to this scroll having been hidden away by King Menashe in an earlier period, and its acceptance is similar to symbolic acceptance-ceremonies (for lack of a better word) scattered throughout the Tanakh. There is nothing in the text to suggest that it is anything more than this, and If the episode had been referring to the entire Torah as a published document and tradition, the compiler of Kings II probably would not have included the brief episode in Kings II in the first place, and it would probably not be nearly so brief as it is.

Further, while it is true that every major religion attempts to flavor its apologetics with unique claims, most of them still suffer from a common element, in that they are all inevitably be reduced to lone individuals performing acts that are easily falsifiable. Muhammad, for instance, cited his own illiteracy as evidence that he did not produce Quran on his own; but pretending to be illiterate, or secretly hiring a scribe to write for you would be fairly easy. Likewise with C.S. Lewis’ formulation of the Trilemma argument. The argument that Jesus was either a lunatic, a liar, or genuine, and that the first two options are unlikely, is weak (Lewis, for his part, thought it was obvious that the first two options were ludicrous), and even very few Christian theologians ever abide by it. In contrast, the Kuzaritic argument has been accepted by the mainstream of Jewry for most of their history, since it is taken from the Torah’s description of the Sinai event, and was of practical legal use in determining the statuses of prophets in ancient Israel. The Kuzaritic argument of mass generation by generation transmission is, I think, tougher to argue against, and I am not aware of any scholars of ancient Near Eastern history who have developed a good, internally consistent historical theory for how Judaism arose that really trumps it.

-True, a recurring blatant intervention would seem to be easiest, but such recurring intervention would have to violate the rule of yeridas hadoros, a principle of which is that Divine intervention becomes less-and-less obvious generationally (Ex. [Ten Plagues:Menorah Oil Lasts Really Long:We Had To Rebuild Our Own State Ourselves = Very Obvious Intervention: Moderately Obvious Intervention: Less Obvious Intervention]).

Further, for the Torah to state something like 2^n-1 along with a long series of possible outcomes, would only be accessible as a proof to the minority of individuals who would have the acumen to comprehend such a formula for themselves. The general, mass population would not understand it and would therefore not be convinced by it, unless they were to rely on mathematicians who do understand it, and then take their word for it, which would still require a leap of trust anyhow. Such a proof, though it would probably be genuine, would only be intellectually accessible to an elite; everyone else would have to take those elite at their word, and so would only constitute real proof for a minority of people.

In contrast, the prophetic announcements in the Torah and in Isaiah concerning the moral decline of Israel, the future suffering and persecution of Israel in legendary proportions, their exile from their land, the promise that neither they (as a national entity) nor their religion will ever be destroyed until even their Messiah comes, and the promise of an eventual return to their land, have always generally been a much more convincing form of proof for the later generations, given that these are all events that have been experienced by the whole group. These pronouncements cannot be taken to refer to the Babylonian exile alone; the pronouncements as they are articulated in Isaiah clearly refer to the whole span of history, leading up to some sort of Messianic redemption. It also compensates for the continuous lengthening of the gap between our generation, and the 1st generation’s experience at Sinai: the list of experiences keeps growing (Ex. the end of the physical exile from the land of Israel in the 20th century).

Balofsky 21 Mar 2012 23:41 UTC
−3 points
in reply to: pedanterrific’s comment on: Ontologial Reductionism and Invisible Dragons
-I say “below the belt,” because I imagine that there are individuals of the Less Wrong community who strongly support SIAI’s work and goals concerning AI, but who simultaneously would not consider such AI creations to be of greater moral value than humans, and I didn’t want these individuals to think that I was making an assumption about their ethical opinions based on their support of AI research.

-Yes, it is largely because of disapproval of the conclusions, but I disapprove of the conclusions because the conclusions are not rational in the face of other intellectual considerations. The failure to see a qualitative difference between humans, baboons and computers suggests an inability to distinguish between living and non-living entities, and I think that is irrational.

Balofsky 21 Mar 2012 23:06 UTC
−9 points
in reply to: HonoreDB’s comment on: Ontologial Reductionism and Invisible Dragons
Secondly, the story of the young Midianite girl is still not good evidence that the Torah considers mass slaughter to be morally okay, and it is not good evidence that historical Jewish ethics have considered it okay. But as hard as it is to say, both economic oppression and war are difficult to uproot, in a way that nonmarital sex is not. War is often a necessary evil, and so is economic inequality, even nowadays; the gradual elimination of both, as horrid as it sounds, probably is more pragmatic. I don’t think the mere fact that permission was granted, in the very beginning, is enough to claim that the Torah treats sex more harshly than economic oppression and war. Both, along with violence & militarism in general, are condemned in the Prophets (especially Jeremiah & Isaiah) repeatedly, explicitly and harshly, over and over again, much more so than any of the other societal ills of the time. This is especially significant when one considers that the Torah does not differentiate between general economic inequality on the one hand, and slavery on the other- the laws that regulate treatment of slaves and treatment of workers are grouped together in the same sections of Deuteronomy.

If slaughter and war were morally okay in the Torah’s view, this notion would have continued on into the Prophets & Writings, as well as the Mishna, and it doesn’t. The general idea expressed in these texts is that war is morally vile, but also often necessary. The defeat of the Greeks was barely mentioned in the way the Channukah story was told, to avoid the celebration of militarism. Where would such an attitude towards war have originally derived from?

Your use of the word genocide is not accurate, anyhow. Genocide is the systematic murder of an entire nation or race, and it is militarily one-sided. The Torah does not describe genocides, it describes wars between mutually opposing armies, and the evils of war do not obviate the fact that it is often practically necessary (this includes tribal war practices of the 13th c. BCE). I am not arguing that genocide is justifiable, I am arguing that war is justifiable, and it is important to use correct terminology. If one were to argue that the Jewish laws defining a just war are defective, then that is a separate discussion, but to argue that Judaism is violent by telling a story about the everyday horrors of war is not reasonable. War is condemned far too clearly, frequently and harshly in the Prophets, and the glorification of warrior-culture and hero worship is far too absent from both the Tanakh and commonly accepted history books on Jewish history, to be able to argue that Judaism is okay with even militarism in general, let alone senseless violence.

Balofsky 21 Mar 2012 21:26 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: HonoreDB’s comment on: Ontologial Reductionism and Invisible Dragons
I’ll break this down into two response, because of the length.

-Assuming the locust-thing is an apologetic gloss doesn’t seem warranted. Locusts have been a common food source in many parts of Asia and Africa for thousands of years, and the fact that the Torah permits the consumption of certain locusts strongly implies that they were being eaten. It seems fair to estimate that the people eating these locusts would have known how many legs they really had, regardless of illiteracy and poor knowledge of animal biology.

-I’m not claiming that the Tanakh itself contains clear, obvious passages expressing wonder at the universe, in fact I pointed out that the text itself generally doesn’t. I’m claiming that the legal tradition that derives from it necessitates the study of nature and makes it inevitable, and that the study of nature became a part of Jewish oral tradition as a consequence. While I used the Kuzari for easy citation, the necessity for scientific study can be seen from the text of the Mishnah. How would the Tannaim have fixed a calendar without studying astronomy, established rules for identifying sick animals without studying animal disease, established rules for eruvin without studying plane geometry, etc? Simply reiterating that the written Tanakh itself doesn’t express much wonder for the universe, ignores the fact that both oral tradition and written law had an equal stake in how Judaism began, and in how it developed. It also ignores the fact that Judaism has always been much more concerned with the morality of concrete, physical activity than with scientific speculation, the latter having been appropriately subordinated and sublimated to the cause of the former.

-You’re right, I am admitting that certain aspects of Jewish thought occupy distinct magisteria. What I am disputing is that rational, scientific methodology is synonymous with reason itself. Many schools of philosophy utilize methods of logic other than the scientific process. As an example (and I don’t mean this to be below the belt), one could claim, as Peter Singer does, that an adult baboon has more utility and moral value than a human infant, since the baboon would have a more developed brain and therefore greater consciousness. By extrapolation, one could similarly claim that a super-intelligent computer would have more utility and moral value than a contemporary adult human, since the former would have a more developed mind and therefore greater consciousness. If ethics are to be understood through the prism of the scientific process as we know it, these ideas could actually be argued for pretty effectively, and I don’t think such methods of reasoning are appropriate for the discussion of such issues.

Balofsky 13 Mar 2012 1:59 UTC
0 points
in reply to: beoShaffer’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Interesting, I’ll look into it. I didn’t meant to retract my introduction, by the way- hit the wrong button.

Balofsky 1 Mar 2012 1:57 UTC
2 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)
Hi!

I’m Balofsky (keeping first name blank), and I am a 24 year old undergraduate student in St. Paul, Minnesota. Interests include anything liberal art-ish, Judaism, politics and memorizing random facts I’ll probably never need in real life.