Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 119 posts

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#21

Post by amelius »

jjgreen wrote: post #16
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mathematical truths are defined to be true Perhaps a nitpick, but: axioms are defined to be true. Mathematics, roughly speaking, is the business of exploring the consequences of chosen sets of axioms. Sometimes published mathematical theorems turn out to be wrong.

Do you think? I'd say that axioms were just taken; there's no commitment to their truth (since there is no need for it, and mathematics likes economy).

It also doesn't make sense to define axioms as true. What if later it turns out that the axioms were a mutual contradiction?

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#22

Post by BlueTemplar »

I am a believer in a form of panspsychism myself, but this article is baffling.

> But the problem for neo-Aristotelians, or indeed anyone who tries to ground moral truth in the natural world, is that moral truths, like mathematical truths, are necessarily true, which means that it’s impossible for them to be false.

The author completely fails to prove why that is the case, not to mention that this isn't even true for Mathematics either, depending on your starting axioms...

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#23

Post by ukj »

bawolff wrote: post #15

Maybe im missing it, but the argument seems to be morality is objective because everyone thinks it is. How is that not begging the question? Then there are a bunch of pithy lines, which the author seems to treat as obvious in context revelations, but to me seem to utterly lack evidence/argument. > "No matter how the universe had turned out, two plus two would equal four and it would have been wrong to torture people…

Every question beggs another. Münchhausen trilemma

All definitions are (meta)circular. Because language is recursive.

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#24

Post by lhorie »

Drakim wrote: post #18
lhorie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider that even murder isn't universally considered bad. Examples include wars, self defense, proponents of the death penalty, the sentinelese, etc. Debates can get particularly heated when one gets into things like abortion and ethical dilemmas. As for the dichotomy of logical verification given our meat-based fallible physical medium, I'm reminded of Godel's incompleteness theory, i.e. that it is possible for a…

True enough, but even so, in these examples you mentioned, war, self defense, death penalty, people struggle a lot with being mentally harmed by taking lives. I read somewhere that Nazi Germany moved to gassing those they persecuted rather than simply killing them by firing squad because the firing squads couldn't handle it day in and day out. The majority of mankind abhors murder, and has to invent elaborate methods…

I think there are both nature and nurture aspects to why in general we dislike the thought of killing our own kind.

Physiologically we have brain mechanisms that activate when we see a stimulus to another person (yawning and phantom limb experiments being well known examples).

Hypothetically if we had evolved from mantises instead of primates, we might be physiologically conditioned to think eating our sexual partners was the norm. I wouldn't be surprised if our moral framework in that case lead to utterances such as "how dare you not sacrifice your life for your children!"

On the nurture side, the sentinelese are perfectly fine with killing foreigners violently on sight. There are also records in other tribal cultures of the belief that cannibalism was a way to inherit someone's desirable traits. So clearly culture plays a role as well.

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#25

Post by TeMPOraL »

bawolff wrote: post #15

Maybe im missing it, but the argument seems to be morality is objective because everyone thinks it is. How is that not begging the question? Then there are a bunch of pithy lines, which the author seems to treat as obvious in context revelations, but to me seem to utterly lack evidence/argument. > "No matter how the universe had turned out, two plus two would equal four and it would have been wrong to torture people…

Yeah, doesn't make sense.

I prefer a simpler argument for why there is a subset of morality that's universal for (vast majority of) humans: argument from shared brain architecture.

We're essentially running the same wetware under the hood, at least on the time scales of human civilization. So while the universe doesn't necessarily privilege a set of values, human brains are. And that's all that really matters (until we meet aliens or start building conscious AIs) - conscious experience is a feature of brains, not laws of physics in general.

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#26

Post by titzer »

donatj wrote: post #12

Right off the bat it fails epicly in its comparison of Gandhi to Epstein as bastions of good and evil, as apparently the author is completely unaware of Gandhi’s sleeping with children? What a horrible choice for the side of good, given Epstein’s horrendous misdeeds. What a horribly written horribly reasoned article. Very frustrating to read. > But if Reality is itself a very general form of consciousness, and my con…

I share your disdain.

Half the people talking about panpsychism are just bloviating in-between hits on DMT and are hoping to achieve Nirvana and merge with some Jungian collective unconscious, but are usually completely ignorant of that entire concept.

Panpsychism doesn't mean everything and everywhere is tripping on acid having a great time. Panpsychism is actually kind of terrifying; just think about what it must feel like to be one of a trillion trillion trillion hydrogen atoms suddenly recruited into a massive supernova and then drifting alone for 5 billion years and being washed through the entirety of life's evolution on Earth, taking part in a trillion different DNA molecules and cell walls; not having any clue about what you've been a part of or why. Being a horrible-looking blood-sucking mosquito downed by a bug-eyed frog, munched on by a croc, farted out a horse...or frozen into a granite hunk in the dark bowels of the Earth for eternity. No, panpsychism doesn't mean your preference for the Yankees over the Mets are somehow the moral code of the universe, or that damn squirrel with a twinkle in its eye is the manifestation of the all-knowing god, you fool (author).

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#27

Post by matz1 »

Drakim wrote: post #18
lhorie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider that even murder isn't universally considered bad. Examples include wars, self defense, proponents of the death penalty, the sentinelese, etc. Debates can get particularly heated when one gets into things like abortion and ethical dilemmas. As for the dichotomy of logical verification given our meat-based fallible physical medium, I'm reminded of Godel's incompleteness theory, i.e. that it is possible for a…

True enough, but even so, in these examples you mentioned, war, self defense, death penalty, people struggle a lot with being mentally harmed by taking lives. I read somewhere that Nazi Germany moved to gassing those they persecuted rather than simply killing them by firing squad because the firing squads couldn't handle it day in and day out. The majority of mankind abhors murder, and has to invent elaborate methods…

Because not everyone think the same. We are not machine where everyone run the same software. Some people like chocolate, some people hate chocolate. Likewise some people think murder is good, some people think its bad.

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#29

Post by aaanotherhnfolk »

I have only a layman's grasp of philosophy. Why doesn't this field challenge its definitions of consciousness more, and why is ethics treated as an axiom? These both seem like anthropocentric positions to me, limiting the discourse. Why can't trees have a conscious experience? And who cares about the morality of a storm cloud?

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#30

Post by jjgreen »

amelius wrote: post #21
jjgreen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think? I'd say that axioms were just taken; there's no commitment to their truth (since there is no need for it, and mathematics likes economy).

It also doesn't make sense to define axioms as true. What if later it turns out that the axioms were a mutual contradiction?

Truth is tricky. If I state "The sky is blue", I can look out of the window, the sky is blue, my statement corresponds to the state of the world, my statement is true, right? But in mathematics there is no window, everything is internal, abstract, so what does "truth" mean when there is no state of the world with which to compare? More importantly, would the mathematics be any different if the axioms are declared to be true? No, it wouldn't make any difference at all. So let's leave "truth" to the physicists and philosophers.
Post reply on HN