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Thanked Posts by AL-LADdin
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2021-11-09 at 11:39 AM UTC in What are you doing at the momentThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-10-11 at 5:50 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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2018-10-01 at 5:04 PM UTC in Killing myself on my birthdayDo a flipThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-10-03 at 4:30 AM 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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2018-10-03 at 2:34 AM UTC in We have a moral obligation to stop eating meat
Originally posted by DietPiano Are you of the belief that everyone has their own independant moral system, in that it may be morally good for one person to eat meat, and morally bad for another?
No, I am of the belief that there is only one moral SYSTEM, the network of moral agents.
The logic is simple. Think of a list of things you wouldn't want done to yourself. You cannot do those to other people, because you will have no justification when you say they shouldn't do that. Everyone can independently come to these same conclusions. If you want to murder people, you forfeit your own right to not be murdered. So assuming you don't want to forfeit your right to life and all the liberties it grants, don't murder people.If you agree that nothing inherently matters and that morality is just a human construct, than how is any of it universal in the slightest?
It doesn't have to be a fundamental law of physics, it's just the meta characterisation of the inevitable result of interactions between self interested agents. I could make a society on this basis from any group of people anywhere. The rationale holds up.Define good and bad.
That's up to you.Is it well being?
Define well-being.
No.Good is subjective.
There is no objective subjective.
Sure. But whatever you choose to take as good or bad can be fit into the system.And does not living things always do what they percieve to be "good" for themselves? How do they intentionally act "badly", or selflessly?
Exactly.Our definitions of good and bad are different. Therfor, our "morality" as you call it, which is a pointless concept that doesn't exist, would be individualized.
You can have whatever moral system you want in your head, dog. But however that transpires, it will fit nicely in to the social contract. Or you could leave society I guess.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-09-30 at 9:38 PM UTC in We have a moral obligation to stop eating meat
Originally posted by DietPiano Kant believed that humans are a "special" creature of the universe that are more important than all other creatures due to some existential force. I reject this conclusion as it is unprovable, and less likely and reasonable than my conclusion that things simply are, and there is no way to know if they ought to be anything.
He thinks that there is a higher force, but what is his evidence that humans are not as animalistic and are inherently more important than anything else? My logical reasoning leades me to conclude that his premises are more faulty than mine.
Therfor, I do reject his premises as they are less reason based and more mystical based. This would be acceptable, except for the lack of hard, witnessable evidence provided (which is what, exactly?).
You don't need to believe in a higher power to agree with Kant's essential point. His ethics are an incredible framework for egoist social contract theory. You can replace the coocoo parts with far more rational ideas, but keep the meat, the framework, the exact same.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-10-02 at 12:50 AM UTC in We have a moral obligation to stop eating meat
Originally posted by Lanny 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.
If you can define a good parameter for artistic quality as a phenomenon, then of course. But again, it will be an explanation that is way more linked to your mental states vs neurology, than to the painting itself.
For example we might just look for the parameters that a painting has to fit, in order to be aesthetically pleasing to you. You might agree that it's conceivable that we might approach a way to solve this problem with, for example, a machine learning approach that tries to use statistics to model your preferences. In fact, we already have some insanely good tech on that front, no? Of course you'd probably need a completely unreasonably massive data set to really get to a perfect model of your insanely complex brain, but technically, it seems possible. But if we do get a close to 100% accuracy model, I can safely say that there is some deterministic machinery behind whatever process you use to generate a judgment of artistic value.
Now, we are never going to find some physical law where we measure artistic value in "art units" (Pablos). But that's because the problem doesn't even exist in that form.
If you want an explanation of some more semantic or qualitative or intentional aspects of artistic value, the question to ask is: what phenomenon are you actually considering describing? If I can model your choices, whether you run that experiment in your mind to generate a choice and then do it, or if I run it to predict how it works in your head and then you tell me, the outcome is the same; you either mentally decide to click on the next video in the YouTube sidebar, or you do it. The semantic or seemingly qualitative content of the choice doesn't really matter.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-09-28 at 8:50 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 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 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! -
2018-09-29 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!
