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2018-09-29 at 6:38 PM UTC in She save our lifeI know that the spades ♠️ Are the swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs ♣️ Are weapons of war
I know that diamonds ♦️ mean money for this art
But that’s not the shape of my heart...♥️The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-09-29 at 6:17 PM UTC in What are you listening to right now, space nigga?The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-09-29 at 5:08 AM UTC in What are you listening to right now, space nigga?The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-09-29 at 4:27 AM UTC in What are you listening to right now, space nigga?The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-09-29 at 2:54 AM UTC in What are you listening to right now, space nigga?The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-09-29 at 12:03 AM UTC in We have a moral obligation to stop eating meatAdditional statement to Obbe:
If you are looking for objective morals, you are looking for ideas of good and bad that apply globally.
If such an idea exists, then its conception of good and bad will also be a global concept rather than an individual one, and the context that it will be "global" in, will be a network of individuals. As such, it will be the concept of the good or bad of the network, not necessarily a given individual. Note however that the individual will generally benefit when the network benefits. The network is society.
It's how the economy works too, and you take it for granted when we talk about markets. You take for granted that we have a consistent set of normative principles that accurately model and govern large datasets of human behaviour. It is driven by subjective personal choices but due to the particular nature of currency, we find it easy to model it numerically. Morals are exactly the same way. You have to build principles based on the health of the moral system, and that extends to the individual agents, merely by acting in their self interest in a way that would benefit everyone, including themselves. The only problem is a lack of the imagination necessary to conduct meta analyses that are based on hard logic and empiricism rather than plug and play number crunching.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-09-28 at 8:52 PM UTC in We have a moral obligation to stop eating meat
Originally posted by POLECAT
Nope. He can use his alt for a while until he goes on a bender and spams and I ban him again I guess, or until I just feel like canning his account for ban evasion, but I can't be fucked to spend the ~10 seconds required to unban in original account.
Originally posted by DietPiano The suggestion that the world "ought" to be a certain way requires evidence outside of organic reasoning, such as hard evidence of the influence of deities on something
Well again, I point you to Kant who made a purely rational, axiomatic system of morality. No external evidence required. You might disagree with him, but if you grant his premises it's pretty hard to reject his conclusions, and his premises don't really require any more of a leap of faith than those we routinely grant in empirical sciences (e.g. universalism, some way to handwave the problem of induction, etc). No deities involved.
You've said several times that morality "requires" this or that, some kind of evidence, or some specific foundation. Where are you getting these ideas about morality? Because frankly there seems to be a pretty obvious counter example in each case we've looked at so far.
Originally posted by DietPiano The way viewing art will act on your neural system causing you to perceive it a certain way is calcuable. The way particles interact is calcuable, and you and your eyes and your brain and the painting are made up of particles, are they not?
Sure, we can mathematically describe the physical systems involved in viewing a piece of art. But that's a mathematical/physical description, not an artistic one. Perhaps artistic properties emerge from physical properties and so it's conceivable that we could reconstruct artistic properties from a description of physical properties. That doesn't commit us to the notion that artistic properties are physical properties, or that artistic properties are mathematically quantifiable.
Again, what would the mathematical description of the artistic properties of the mona lisa look like? Is it a big column vector with a 3 for the palette value and a 20 for the composition value and numeric values for every other artistic property of a painting? That doesn't seem to really capture what we mean when we talk about that artistic properties of a painting.
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2018-09-28 at 8:50 PM UTC in We have a moral obligation to stop eating meat
Originally posted by Obbe If I imagine you shitting your pants would you recognize it as real?
Of course I would recognize it as a real thing. That image in your mind is some kind of network of associations in your mind and, objectively speaking, ultimately your brain. It had a causal consequence in the world, i.e. you typing that sentence, and me posting this reply, and everyone who will read it etc. Do you think it is a magic spark that generates some new "causal energy" into the universe?
It's not the same thing as me physically defecating my pants, but it's undeniably real.
The idea you should try attacking is whether there is any cogency to the idea of a generalized, empirical, predictively useful description of these data structures.
I will respond to Lanny, and you should read the next section to understand the concept I will use in the subsequent section to address your next post.
Originally posted by Lanny But to go off on a tangent that doesn't really matter a little bit, I don't think "everything is described by mathematical equations" really follows from naturalism. The meaning of emergent properties is that they're properties not possessed in component parts, or at a lower level. Like sure, maybe we can give a mathematical account of the physical components of a painting, but in doing so we aren't describing the artistic properties of that painting. Like maybe we can even reconstruct the artistic properties from the physical ones (although in the case of art we'd probably also have to consider a huge array of cultural systems) but that doesn't mean we have a mathematical description of art.
It's not obvious at all that we could write some kind of formula or function from physical descriptions of art to artistic meaning chiefly because artistic properties don't seem to be mathematical. There is no mathematical object to represent them, it's almost absurd to think of some art evaluation function which takes is an sub-atomic description of the mona lisa and produces "5212 artons" or something. That's not to say the artistic properties of a painting aren't emergent from its physical properties, simply that being able to mathematically describe properties does not mean being able to do the same same for emergent properties.
Sort of. Emergent properties are essentially "ways of looking at" the underlying physical phenomena (so to speak), where we (keyword "we") find some kind of interesting or relevant regularity.
To run with painting example, lets say it is a pointillist painting of a sheep: if you look close with your naked eye, you might see the dots. But as you walk backwards and start exposing your mind to the more complete portions of the total data set, your brain gets the appropriate conditions to make the appropriate associations. Then you start seeing some meta patterns, then shapes, then associations to projected shapes of real objects, and with it, a comprehension of the depiction of the sheep. There is no discrete point where the painting becomes real. This "framings" don't exist in any fundamental aspect of nature. But it is real to us because we exist in a context where we can frame these patterns or regularities in a particular way. So the examination of the artistic properties of a painting, for example, would be more like a topic within the study of the position of humans within the context of nature at large.
It is erroneous to posit some more universal, underlying metastructure of meaning or information to the painting; it simply happens to be meaningful in your ontology and your ontology is very widely shared amongst humans like yourself, but even then, not universally so. For example, Deregowski's 1972 "Pictorial perception and culture", regardless of how you interpret the specifics of the work, it is clear that even the associations formed regarding the same visual information isn't universal.
But more importantly, neither the painting nor the atoms of the painting, or even the fact of its own existence, exist in the ontology of the light bulb you might be using to view the painting. And the lightbulb does have a private ontology... but only because we exist to create the idea of an ontology of anything, and the lightbulb fits the criteria, and so does the beetle, and of course so does man. We could say each particle has its own very simple ontology; it doesn't know anything, it's ontology is simply how it interacts with other particles. I'm using the word "ontology" for lightbulbs and particles here like Dan Dennett applies "umwelt" to non-"living" things, it's sort of the "world of" a particular thing. A particle doesn't need to know anything, it is simply bound to operate under a certain domain of function, and that is its ontology. It has energy, velocity, a vector, and an ability to interact with other particles in a specific way.
The question of the artistic properties of a painting come down to how we come to have our own ontology (which we could roughly sum up as consciousness), with all its subjective aspects, and how the painting fits into our ontology as we operate in the world.
On the assumption that our ontology as a whole cannot be reduced to the facts about physical phenomena, I first would contend that we can reduce it to facts about the ontology of the constituent physical phenomena. This process occurs entirely within our own ontology, it's not an objective act yet. You can do it with simpler objects in a very straightforward way: for example, I can perfectly explain the ontology of a weighing scale through the ontology of everything that goes into producing an output on the LCD.
Then next, the question becomes how we have an ontology at all out of purely physical facts, and that problem remains unresolved. Fortunately we don't need to devour the problem whole to show that our experiences do have physical bases, we can do it in small pieces. We can easily see some of the fundamentally physical foundations and limits to the qualitative content we experience. For example, whether you resolve the image of the sheep or a noise of dots is entirely contingent on how many elements of the painting can reflect photons in such a way as to reach your cornea without distortion, which could roughly be stated by the position of your eyes relative to the painting, factoring in the way the lens works. Furthermore if I then ask you which one you see, to give me an answer, you would pulling an idea directly out of your consciousness (you need to actually possess the idea of the sheep or dot there) and putting it into the real world, where it will have a causal effect on me. Presumably your body and brain obey the laws of physics and energy is conserved. So it seems undeniable that there is a physical explanation for how our ontology is constructed.
Even if you want to resort to epiphenomenalism, then you would still need to explain how despite the fact that your body can produce the word "sheep" in a semantically appropriate context from a completely physical process, you can still deny that it can do so for that same information structure in your mind.
So you are making a category error in your example: no examination of the painting will yield its artistic meaning, because that does not exist in the painting. The meaning is created in your brain, as a way to process the information it receives from your eyes. A beetle looking at the same painting with the same visual framing might associate nothing with it at all. If I were to make a perfect mathematical model of your brain, I could almost certainly "decode" the artistic "meaning" of the painting to you. Of course that would not break into further semantic terms; the semantic terms are the human talk, and they must ultimately reduce into something that can be produced through non-"meaningful" processes, otherwise you don't even begin to approach how they can exist. I can't meaning from the art because it's not in the art, and it's not likely that the formulation manifest image is inside the manifest image, which is where the scientific image is nested.
Originally posted by Obbe Do you believe any particular moral system is objectively more correct than another?
Sure. Egoist philosophy abstracts away the need for a fully physical, mathematical model of morals by just treating each individual moral agent as a black box. This is how we can construct, for example, social contracts. Again, this is an emergent phenomenon based on a larger scale view of the interaction of smaller systems, and egoism can simply be an easy big picture model for whatever small picture stuff happens behind the scene. This is the same way that we use fluid dynamics to model the behaviours of fluids as some kind of contiguous, infinitely malleable objects rather than modeling every single particle interaction, even if fluids are composed of atoms. Egoist morals don't exist out in the world, they are a human construction, but neither do "fluids"; that concept only exists in the human mind, as an abstraction of a bunch of tightly packed, weakly cohesive particles. Egoist morals do the same for social phenomena, by simply picking out the common element for every agent in society; their own individual, self interested agency. That's it. We can work with that.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-09-28 at 8:28 PM UTC in We have a moral obligation to stop eating meat
Originally posted by Lanny that doesn't mean we have a mathematical description of art.
It's not obvious at all that we could write some kind of formula or function from physical descriptions of art to artistic meaning chiefly because artistic properties don't seem to be mathematical. There is no mathematical object to represent them, it's almost absurd to think of some art evaluation function which takes is an sub-atomic description of the mona lisa and produces "5212 artons" or something. That's not to say the artistic properties of a painting aren't emergent from its physical properties, simply that being able to mathematically describe properties does not mean being able to do the same same for emergent properties.
The way viewing art will act on your neural system causing you to perceive it a certain way is calcuable. The way particles interact is calcuable, and you and your eyes and your brain and the painting are made up of particles, are they not?The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-09-28 at 8:20 PM UTC in We have a moral obligation to stop eating meat
Originally posted by Lanny There are many things which are the case which are not described my a mathematical formula. There is no mathematical formula that describes propositions like "Trump is the president of the US" or "my head hurts" but these are obviously things with truth values, and further which seem something we could investigate and discover the truth of.
I don't currently have a computer and I haven't had the motivation as of late to thumb type a response on my phone to your last rebuttal yet.
Anyway, I disagree with your statement. I believe everything may well be calcuable, including your examples. Trump being the president is calculabe becuose every action of a given living being in a given coordinate in spacetime will necessarily act a certain way 100% percent of the time. Every action and every thought and every movement of every quark is scripted.
This is what I believe to be true, however I can't necessarily prove it, nor can you prove that there is not a script. This is more of a free will debate, as those who believe in a script will generally believe that the world simply "is", and those who believe in true free will generally believe that world "ought" to be a certain way.
The belief that the world "is" is more rationally, because that is the most logical conclusion someone who hasn't been exposed to the ideas of morality or religion will come to. It is a purely logical explanation.
The suggestion that the world "ought" to be a certain way requires evidence outside of organic reasoning, such as hard evidence of the influence of deities on something, which cannot be proven given the lack of hard evidence such as visible or audible deities that appear before humans, or religous relics that defy earthly laws of physics or are composed of materials found nowhere else on Earth. The best artifacts available are things that can be, and probably were, created by humans.
Therfor, it is irrational to believe that the world "ought" to be some way, unless you happen to be in posession of some divine evidence that you are not sharing, or you have witnessed a deity that has not appeared before anyone else.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-09-28 at 3:19 PM UTC in We have a moral obligation to stop eating meat
Originally posted by AL-LADdin If you are a naturalist, then your best guess should be that these things are in fact described by mathematical equations. So are opinions and lights. In theory, these are simply emergent phenomena within a system with a relatively simple set of rules.
Well like you said, even if this is your position it still renders the objection "we have no mathematical description of ethics" inert since, like you said, we don't need to have formed such a description for it to exist (and by extension for the phenomena described to have a status as objective).
But to go off on a tangent that doesn't really matter a little bit, I don't think "everything is described by mathematical equations" really follows from naturalism. The meaning of emergent properties is that they're properties not possessed in component parts, or at a lower level. Like sure, maybe we can give a mathematical account of the physical components of a painting, but in doing so we aren't describing the artistic properties of that painting. Like maybe we can even reconstruct the artistic properties from the physical ones (although in the case of art we'd probably also have to consider a huge array of cultural systems) but that doesn't mean we have a mathematical description of art.
It's not obvious at all that we could write some kind of formula or function from physical descriptions of art to artistic meaning chiefly because artistic properties don't seem to be mathematical. There is no mathematical object to represent them, it's almost absurd to think of some art evaluation function which takes is an sub-atomic description of the mona lisa and produces "5212 artons" or something. That's not to say the artistic properties of a painting aren't emergent from its physical properties, simply that being able to mathematically describe properties does not mean being able to do the same same for emergent properties.
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2018-09-28 at 2:26 PM UTC in We have a moral obligation to stop eating meatThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-09-28 at 2:23 PM UTC in We have a moral obligation to stop eating meat
Originally posted by Lanny There are many things which are the case which are not described my a mathematical formula. There is no mathematical formula that describes propositions like "Trump is the president of the US" or "my head hurts" but these are obviously things with truth values, and further which seem something we could investigate and discover the truth of.
If you are a naturalist, then your best guess should be that these things are in fact described by mathematical equations. So are opinions and lights. In theory, these are simply emergent phenomena within a system with a relatively simple set of rules.
But there is no need for these to be available to us, for them to exist.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-09-28 at 2:06 PM UTC in We have a moral obligation to stop eating meatThey're called universal truths, Lanny. And, yes, as you say, they do exist.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-09-28 at 1:59 PM UTC in We have a moral obligation to stop eating meat
Originally posted by mmQ Honest question lanyard, how is ought to be not an opinion? There's some moral, understood standard that we're not collectively aware of? Like a utopia?
Ought statements can be a person's opinion in the same sense that is statements can be. I can have an opinion about the shape of the earth and I can have an opinion about how we should treat animals. It's obvious that some opinions about the shape of the earth are true, while others are not. "Is statements" about the shape of the world express something about the world, they may not be true, but there is a fact of the matter The point I'm making is simply that when I talk about "ought statements" I'm talking about statements that have this same quality: they're either true or they aren't.
In this last little branch of this sprawling thread I haven't yet asserted that any particular ought statement is true. If you think there's just no objective moral demands upon us then you think that the value of every ought statement is false, as there is nothing that ought to be. That's fine. The point I've been making is simply about what is meat by ought statements, this is statements about how the world actually should be rather that simply how I want it do be. I've brought up a couple of times now that it's possible to hold different opinions about how you want the world to be and how you think the would should be, which at very least should immediately rule out the notion that ought statements simply express desire.Is there a mathematical formula that describes the ought?
There are many things which are the case which are not described my a mathematical formula. There is no mathematical formula that describes propositions like "Trump is the president of the US" or "my head hurts" but these are obviously things with truth values, and further which seem something we could investigate and discover the truth of.
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2018-09-28 at 12:26 PM UTC in We have a moral obligation to stop eating meat
Originally posted by Obbe The "way the world should be" exists only in imagination.
Do you think imagination is some magic phenomenon that arbitrarily emerges from your ass and the spirit of god, or do you acknowledge it is some kind of natural/evolved phenomenon that is consequential to real agents that exist within the real world?The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-09-28 at 5:42 AM UTC in SCIENTISTS : WE WERE WRONG, TIME AND TIME AGAIN.PART 2 : IS PLUTO A PLANET AND WILL YOU CALL ME LATER ?
YES, NO, MAYBE ....
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/pluto-true-planet-043243/In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) set forth a new set of guidelines for what constitutes a planet. In a decision that surprised and even infuriated a lot of people, the commission announced that Pluto could no longer be considered a planet, in light of these new guidelines — and, ever since, the scientific community has debated Pluto’s place and status in the solar system.
[snipped]
instead the researchers found over 100 recent examples where researchers had used the word planet in a way that would violate the IAU definition. “They are doing it because it’s functionally useful,” Metzger said.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-09-28 at 2:36 AM UTC in feminism of the highest orderBeast and the Beast.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-09-27 at 5:07 PM UTC in Wanna know who killed J.F.K. ?? Makes as much sense as anything else. More so.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-09-27 at 11:51 AM UTC in The Liserds Are Real and God is the DevilThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
