Am I understanding correctly that this idea of wholesomeness is purely definitory/axiomatic (like mathematics) containing no (extraordinary) claims at all, so it doesn’t make sense to ask “Is this true?” but rather “Is it useful?”, and whether “to act wholesomely is good” is just hypothesis you are even actually testing?
Because then I see its great advantage over religious moral systems, that do contain such claims that actually might be false, but people are demanded to believe them.
Wow, thanks for your willingness to test/falsify your statements, and I apologize for my rash judgment. Your idea just sounded to me to be too good to be true, so I wanted to be cautious.
And I would be glad to say I am completely satisfied with your answer. However, that is not the case yet, maybe just because the “mistakes” of the people trying to apply wholesomeness might still need a definition—a criterion according to which something is or is not a mistake.
However, if you provided such a definition, I might be another tester of this style of thinking.
Could someone, please, confirm or disprove my impression that this idea might be not falsifiable at all? And if it is not, could someone, please, explain to me what reasons to apply this idea are still there (I am skeptical and curious, not completely denying)?
However, I appreciate this attempt to offer such an interesting moral idea/hypothesis/theory like this.
Hello, my name is Peter and recently I read Basics of Rationalist Discourse and iteratively checked/updated the current post based on the points stated in those basics:
I (possibly falsely) feel that moral (i.e. “what should be”) theories should be reducible because I see the analogy with the demand of “what is” theories to be reducible due to Occam’s razor. I admit that my feeling might be false (and I know analogy might not be a sufficient reason), and I am ready to admit that it is. However, despite reading the whole Mere Goodness from RAZ I cannot remember any reasons (maybe they are there, and I don’t blame the author (EY), if not), but many interesting statements (e.g. about becoming the pleasure brain center itself). And I remember there was such a long dialog there that might have explained this to me but I didn’t comprehend its bottom line.
This post is not intended to have any conclusion more general than about my state of mind, and if there is such an impact, I don’t mean it.
I find splitting the Great Idea a very useful tool to quantify its relevance (“For how many parts do I feel they are true?”), and this way, to apply falsification (for which I find “If your idea wasn’t true, how would you find out? Because if you don’t ask, it might be not true, but you didn’t find out.” to be the most logical and intuitive description. And so in case of splitting, you can say “I would admit my idea was incorrect, if not all its 12 parts felt correct separately. Easy.”.).
I agree with both “emotion” and “pretend” hypotheses. It is (according to my world view) extremely difficult to pretend emotions you are not possessing. Thus, the easiest way to pretend your beliefs might be to manipulate your own emotions.
Wow, thanks very much. Your post boosted my usage of this handbook rapidly from that day, I intensely enjoy doing these exercises, and I find them extremely helpful and effective. Thanks once again.
“His own stupid”—the idea that if someone is stupid, he deserves all the bad consequences of being stupid.
Disproof:
Let’s assume this is true. Then there would have been at least one voluntary action that turned him from wise to stupid. But why would someone voluntarily choose to be stupid? Only because he wouldn’t have known what being stupid means, so he would be already stupid. Thus there would be no such first action. (Assumtion rejected.)
Very nicely written. A good example of this might be invention of genetic flaw correction, due to which morally controversial abortion could become less desired option.
I am stuck at the prompt no. 1, because I am wondering whether it is possible to name all the wants once forever despite the complexity of human morality.
Thanks in advance for explanation.
What about moral duty to be curious?
For everytime I am curious about “how the things are?”, I would like to be curious also about “what to do?” then. (Curious pragmatism)
My suggestion for alternative explanation is that people somehow assume that for saving more birds, more people will be asked to donate, so after dividing, the amounts per person will be very similar.
I agree that voting might be little bit annoying.
On the other side, it could potentially make the search for specific qualities of comment much easier if automated (by sorting). (E.g. “Now I am not in the mood for solving difficult concepts so I want something with high clarity evaluation.” or “Now I am too tired to argue/fight so I want something empathic now.”)
1. entity that regularly makes the acts of changing the owner of object of value from the other entities to self without providing any signal according to that the given other entity could have any reason to hypothesize such change in short term time horizon of its perceptual and cognitive activity.
2. relatively common state of a natural system of currently detecting an internal insufficiency of specific sources interpreting it as the threat to its existence or proper functioning and causing it to perform an attempt to compensate for it and deflect such threat.
3. the natural object which is usually keeping its shape and is making an impression of having a value much greater than other kinds of natural shape-keeping objects probably due to the easily recognizable hue and also due to the relatively low amount of it in reachable universe.
Excuse me. What should be easy to remember? Concept names or whole frameworks?
Ok, thanks. This is very interesting, and correct in theory (I guess). And I would be very glad to apply it. But before doing my first steps in it on my own by the trial-&-error method, I would like to know some best practices in doing so, if they are available at all. I strongly doubt this is a common practice in a common population and I slightly doubt that it is the common practice also for a “common” attendee of this forum, but I would still like to make this my (usual) habit.
And the greatest issue I see in this is how to talk to common people around me about common uncertain things that are probabilistic if they actually think of the common things as they would be certain. Should I try to gradually and unnoticeably change their paradigm? Or should I use double language: probabilistic inside, but confidential outside?
(I am aware that these questions might be difficult, and I don’t necessarily expect direct answers.)
OK, thanks, but then one of my additional questions is: what is the reasonable threshold for the probability of my belief A given all available evidence B1, B2, .., Bn? And why?
Hello, I would like to ask whether there is any summary/discussion of necessary/sufficient criteria according to which a reason for whatever (belief, action, goal, …) is sufficient. If not, I would like to discuss it.
I would like to ask whether there is a good reason for step 1 - outline your plan. I think it would be much easier to use, if we started with just a simple plan or even with no plan, and kept improving/extending it by those iterations.