Richard, my objections in my e-mail to you still stand. I suppose to a Pete Singer utilitarian it might be correct that we assign equal weight of importance to everyone in and beyond our reality, but not everyone accepts that and you have not established that we ought to. If I am a simulation, I take my simulation as my reality and care as little about the space-time simulating me (outside of how they affect me) as another simulation someone in our reality might create. Outside of the issue of importance, you still have not established how we obtain oughts. You simply ask that we accept the authority of someone even as you acknowledge that this person may be a liar and/or malevolent. You have hit the “worship” button without regard to whether it is Nyarlathotep/Loki/Lucifer you are worshiping (in that respect you are not all that different from the adherents of the more primitive religions). Your post was also quite long. I suggest you get a blog of your own to host it on. All the cool people are doing it.
TGGP2
I think it was the Stoics who said one’s ethical duty was to act in accordance with the Universe. Marcus Aurelius did a lousy job of making sure his son was competent to run the empire though.
So, then Richard, do you assert that morality does have observable effects on the universe? Do you think that a physicist can do an experiment that will grant him/her knowledge of morality? You have been rather vague by saying that just as we discovered many positive facts with science, so we can discover normative ones, even if we have not been able to do so before. You haven’t really given any indication as to how anyone could possibly do that, except by analogizing again to fields that have only discovered positive rather than normative facts. It would seem to me the most plausible explanation for this difference is that there are none of the latter.
Richard, if morality is a sort of epiphenomenon with no observable effects on the universe, how could anyone know anything about it?
Richard, I don’t actually believe philosophers are idiots because I’ve seen their standardized test scores. I do think they could more productively use their intellects though. If I were to ignore IQ/general intelligence and simply try to judge whether one philosopher does better philosophizing than another, would I be able to do it without becoming a philosopher myself and judging their arguments? I can determine that rocket physicists are good at what they do because they successfully send rockets in the air, I know brain surgeons are because the brains they operate on end up with the behavior they promise. I can’t think of anything I would hire a philosopher for, other than teaching a philosophy course. So is the merit of philosophy an entirely circular thing or is there a heuristic the non-philosopher layman can use that will let him know he should pay more attention to philosophers than palm-readers?
Hopefully Anonymous had a post about zombies here, in which I made fun of him.
Anticipating experience may be a useful constraint for science, but that is not all there is to know.
If I was going to dispute this I would have to specify what it means to “know” and get into one of those goofy epistemology discussions I derided here. Philosophy is the required method to argue against philosophy, oh bother. Good thing reality doesn’t revolve around dispute.
getting out of touch with your basic humanity
I am a homo sapien, therefore my characteristics are human. Perhaps I should wonder why you have an inhuman bias against torture, but of course that is human as well.
Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto
mtraven, do you really believe in the existence of the soul, or are you just using it because it is in common usage? At my blog I was thinking of writing a post whose title began “Thank god”, then remembered I had already declared I was an agnotheist, and then considered “Thank goodness”, but remembered I didn’t believe in objective good either.
The Blues and Greens were Catholics and Monophysites (I forget which was which). They once united and almost overthrew the emperor Justinian (his wife persuaded him not to flee) but Narses set them against each other and crushed their revolt.
You have not established that one ought to “do his best to increase his intelligence, his knowledge of reality and to help other ethical intelligent agents do the same”. Where is the jump from is to ought? I know Robin Hanson gave a talk saying something along those lines, but he was greeted with a considerable amount of disagreement from people whose ethical beliefs aren’t especially different from his.
That entails consistently resisting tyranny and exploitation.
If a tyrant’s goal was to increase their knowledge of reality and spread it which they chose to go about with violence and exploitation, resistance could very well hinder those goals.
But intelligence can be defined as the ability to predict and control reality or to put it another way to achieve goals.
That would make Azathoth incredibly intelligent, and Azathoth isn’t called the “blind idiot” for nothing.
So, if your only goal is to increase intelligence
You haven’t established that ought to be our goal.
You cannot increase intelligence indefinitely without eventually confronting the question of what other goals the intelligence you have helped to create will be applied to.
The intelligence might have no other goals other than those I choose to give it and the intelligence I am endlessly increasing might be my own.
That is a tricky question that our civilization does not have much success answering, and I am trying to do better.
Why is a “civilization” the unit of analysis rather than a single agent?
I assign most of the intrinsic good to obeying the Mugger
I do not and you have not established that I should.
the more intrinsic good gets heaped on obeying the Mugger.
You have not established that obeying the mugger will actually lead to preferable results.