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The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

nautil.us

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Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#31

Post by extempore »

lhorie wrote: post #17
Drakim wrote: post #11

Here is my take: All knowledge is ultimately based on assumptions, and those assumptions ultimately hang in thin air. We rely on our senses to observe the world around us, and we rely on our mental faculties to interpenetrate what we observe. But we have no way of knowing if our senses, and our mental faculties, can be trusted, if they are accurate to some objective reality. It might very well be that what we take in…

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…

None of those things is murder, which is unlawful killing, usually premeditated. Maybe there is a society which doesn’t hold murder to be wrong, but I’ve never heard of it, and it’s hard to see how it could last.

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#32

Post by Drakim »

matz1 wrote: post #27
Drakim wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Humans are not a chaotic collection of random emotions and opinions. You'll find that those who like to eat dirt and murder others are far outnumbered by those who like chocolate and want to live in harmony.

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#33

Post by Iv »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #25
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…

I like the idea that morality is something that is built by mankind and that needs to be extracted by studies.

For instance, economists have found the value at which US society estimates an American's life by seeing at which point risks balances costs in some hazardous investments.

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#34

Post by DonHopkins »

matz1 wrote: post #27
Drakim wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If God didn't mean for people to eat other people, they wouldn't be made of meat. ;)

(To paraphrase Flanders' and Swann's song, "The Reluctant Cannibal"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAHw2DEBgw

"Always be sincere, whether you mean it or not."

"I won't let another man pass my lips!"

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#35

Post by roenxi »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #25
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…

There is an even simpler explanation: some moral principles push people towards a game-theoretic optimum, so evolution selects for it.

Eg, a society that allows random murders will be at a staggering disadvantage. By magic, most (all?) societies have strong moral arguments against murder. Ditto honesty - honest societies have structural advantages.

Any cooperative species will have something that looks like morality. Even ants practice first aid.

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#36

Post by danidiaz »

Bart Streumer is mentioned in the piece. His book "Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory about All Normative Judgements" begins with a pretty cool sentence:

> You cannot believe the view I will defend in this book. I therefore will not be able to convince you that this view is true.

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#37

Post by Drakim »

lhorie wrote: post #24
Drakim wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 partner…

Yup, agreed. Likewise, concepts such as the taste of sweet, salt, sour; colors such as red, blue and yellow; behaviors such as aggressive, calm, afraid; emotions such as happy, angry, sad; evaluations such as beautiful, ugly, plain;

All of these are from nature and nurture, they don't exist as mathematical laws or any sort of foundational aspect of how the universe works. It's all just subjective and arbitrary inventions we have created to categorize and make sense of what we observe.

Yet they are all immensely important to us! Even though they don't have objective grounding. We base our entire societies, our ways of life, our ways of thinking, around these incredibly non-justified categories of things.

Yet, there is a whole lot of people who seem to want to exclude morality from this box. It has to be thrown out, because it's not objective, not justified, not "real". But in contrast to what exactly?

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#38

Post by ukj »

Iv wrote: post #33
TeMPOraL wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like the idea that morality is something that is built by mankind and that needs to be extracted by studies. For instance, economists have found the value at which US society estimates an American's life by seeing at which point risks balances costs in some hazardous investments.

This conception is highly susceptible to Goodhart's law.

It favours the quantitative over the qualitative which is a good way to trip over the McNamara fallacy.

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#39

Post by fenomas »

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).

In math "true" is essentially just a name for a symbol. Saying that an axiom is true is like saying that 3 comes after 2 - it doesn't imply any kind of truth in the usual "consistent with reality" sense.

Re: The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

#40

Post by chousuke »

jjgreen wrote: post #30
amelius wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is perhaps not all that relevant to your point, but "the sky is blue" so often being used as an example of an obvious truth is amusing to me, because very often the sky is not all that blue at all.

If I look outside right now, the sky is probably better described as cyan; quite obviously a different colour from the blue exercise mat that happens to be on my floor.

The sky can also be described by many of the other colours depending on weather or the time of day.

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