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What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

nautil.us

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Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#21

Post by pixl97 »

club_tropical wrote: post #13
coldtea wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) There's also your body, in the arms and legs and torso sense, which is you, but it's not your brain. There's also your non conscious part (whether you want to include a Freud style subconscious, or autonomous functioning parts that reach a decision way before it has registered as a conscious though) which is your brain, but not exactly "you" as you think of you. Plus all kind of body-produced chemicals and hormone…

1) It sounds from what you write that you agree, even if reluctantly so, because "there is no diff". For completeness sake, I want to clarify that I believe in something far stronger than your reluctant resignation: that the whole conscious/subconscious separation, the body/head/hormone separation, that these are all artificial and wrong categorizations. There is one you, the whole you, no part meaningfully separable…

2b)

You drop a bottle on a biking trail. Do you clean it up?

I mean, you likely won't get caught or in trouble if you don't, but you're apt to cause other humans harm by increasing the risk they'll get a flat tire.

You drop a bottle off the edge of a cliff. Do you clean it up?

Most people would not, the time and risk of getting to where the bottle is, is high versus the risk of someone being hurt by it.

I believe you've discounted a huge amount of the probability and calculation our minds do in a subconscious manner. Try to catch a ball in zero gravity for a lesson in our built in assumptions.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#22

Post by lob_it »

Willful ignorance explains methane with climate change, the opiod epidemic and even inferior calories and the correlation to obesity (high fructose corn syrup in beverages or where it does not belong for example).

Many 21st century innovations replace/supersede/override/make moribund and verify why hypothesis, theory and fact was agreed to, just as they have done in centuries past.

Working with incorrect data has all kinds of random effects. The lead in fuels could have lowered IQ enough for the brain to not even be in the present :p

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/20-of-the-grea...

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/30/1031429212/the-world-has-fina...

I kinda laughed at the fiction genre comments. Its a very simple analogy....

Doo doo comes out of my butt. Aliens have the same mouth and same ass :)

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#23

Post by antiterra »

pessimizer wrote: post #20
club_tropical wrote: post #3

Behold, one of the most dangerous and toxic forms of stupid: the LABCOAT-FLASHER. Do not fall for the verbal trickeries and hypotheticals - they are the syntactic sugar masking various POISONS: 1) There is no “you” that is meaningfully apart from “your brain”. This trickery is meant to dissociate you from your body and backdoor sneak-in the labcoat-flasher as a co-conspiritor against yourself. It is every bit as gasl…

I need to hear a restatement of 3) that doesn't rely on the word "equal" or "egalitarian" without defining them in the context of the argument you're making. What does it mean to say that everyone is or isn't "equal?" Are you trying to say that people are distinct (i.e. there is more than one person)? Are you trying to say that people aren't the same height, and there are others insisting that they are? What are you…

Right, I can think my child is abstractly ‘equal’ to another person’s child but also not feel as much ownership for their well being.

I think what the commenter is saying is similar to a reductio ad absurdum of what it would be like if every child was of equal direct importance and priority to you. It, however, doesn’t address what would happen if everyone in a community voluntarily had this concern nominally and therefore could allocate responsibility across many.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#24

Post by adhesive_wombat »

avgcorrection wrote: post #16

My brain isn’t into the future because of climate change, the threat of WWIII/nuclear war, The Economy, possible future pandemics like the one of 2020, and not being able to retire until I’m 70. But please do Gee Wiz me all you want about logical fallacies, nautil dot us.

> not being able to retire until I’m 70

I genuinely think that is optimistic. I'm not at all sure retirement will really be a thing in a couple of generations.

Certainly the 20-40 year retirements that are dangled don't seem likely for many people.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#25

Post by pessimizer »

antiterra wrote: post #23
pessimizer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to hear a restatement of 3) that doesn't rely on the word "equal" or "egalitarian" without defining them in the context of the argument you're making. What does it mean to say that everyone is or isn't "equal?" Are you trying to say that people are distinct (i.e. there is more than one person)? Are you trying to say that people aren't the same height, and there are others insisting that they are? What are you…

Right, I can think my child is abstractly ‘equal’ to another person’s child but also not feel as much ownership for their well being. I think what the commenter is saying is similar to a reductio ad absurdum of what it would be like if every child was of equal direct importance and priority to you. It, however, doesn’t address what would happen if everyone in a community voluntarily had this concern nominally and the…

I have no idea of what the commenter is actually trying to say, which is why I asked. I have to admit that usually when I hear people make statements like that, they're being deceptive in a couple of ways.

Sometimes, when people claim a logical implication (if A then B), and people object to them by saying that A doesn't imply B, they will 1) follow with a claim that the objector is claiming that nothing can imply anything else, or 2) follow with a claim that "A doesn't imply B" is equivalent to saying "B doesn't exist."

In these ways, a claim of "all birds fly" responds to a counter-claim of "not all birds fly" with: "so you're saying that there are no birds that fly, then" or even worse "so you're saying that nothing can fly, then." I've even seen "so you're saying that everything except birds can fly, then."

So I have no idea where it is going, but precision in the definitions of "equal" or "egalitarian" used in this context would help me to understand.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#26

Post by avgcorrection »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #24
avgcorrection wrote: post #16

My brain isn’t into the future because of climate change, the threat of WWIII/nuclear war, The Economy, possible future pandemics like the one of 2020, and not being able to retire until I’m 70. But please do Gee Wiz me all you want about logical fallacies, nautil dot us.

> not being able to retire until I’m 70 I genuinely think that is optimistic. I'm not at all sure retirement will really be a thing in a couple of generations. Certainly the 20-40 year retirements that are dangled don't seem likely for many people.

Well yes. Exactly.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#27

Post by User23 »

pessimizer wrote: post #20
club_tropical wrote: post #3

Behold, one of the most dangerous and toxic forms of stupid: the LABCOAT-FLASHER. Do not fall for the verbal trickeries and hypotheticals - they are the syntactic sugar masking various POISONS: 1) There is no “you” that is meaningfully apart from “your brain”. This trickery is meant to dissociate you from your body and backdoor sneak-in the labcoat-flasher as a co-conspiritor against yourself. It is every bit as gasl…

I need to hear a restatement of 3) that doesn't rely on the word "equal" or "egalitarian" without defining them in the context of the argument you're making. What does it mean to say that everyone is or isn't "equal?" Are you trying to say that people are distinct (i.e. there is more than one person)? Are you trying to say that people aren't the same height, and there are others insisting that they are? What are you…

Surely you understand exactly what is meant. Why play dumb? For example I’m not equal to Bobby Fischer as a chess player.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#28

Post by jasmer »

club_tropical wrote: post #3

Behold, one of the most dangerous and toxic forms of stupid: the LABCOAT-FLASHER. Do not fall for the verbal trickeries and hypotheticals - they are the syntactic sugar masking various POISONS: 1) There is no “you” that is meaningfully apart from “your brain”. This trickery is meant to dissociate you from your body and backdoor sneak-in the labcoat-flasher as a co-conspiritor against yourself. It is every bit as gasl…

The premise of the article is a bit more simple: things we can imagine more clearly, have more meaning to us.

It's very simply articulated using concept of 'describing' vs. 'seeing' vs. 'doing'.

It's hard for us to empathize with soldiers fighting wars, or refugees fleeing them - but when someone shows us pictures, or better yet, tells us their authentic story, it becomes visceral, and therefore we give legitimacy to the situation.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#29

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

club_tropical wrote: post #3

Behold, one of the most dangerous and toxic forms of stupid: the LABCOAT-FLASHER. Do not fall for the verbal trickeries and hypotheticals - they are the syntactic sugar masking various POISONS: 1) There is no “you” that is meaningfully apart from “your brain”. This trickery is meant to dissociate you from your body and backdoor sneak-in the labcoat-flasher as a co-conspiritor against yourself. It is every bit as gasl…

I think the bigger problem with #3 is not that nobody buys the equality claim, but that we accept the premise.

If all humans were equal, there would be only one human. That's how equality works

The underlying claim is actually that all humans are of equal value. Yet there's no clear way to map humanity onto the number line. No generally accepted evaluation function. Egalitarianism declares such a function and then leaves it lying around for oppressors to define.

This makes us weak against attacks where we're pitted against each other under the oversight of some master and we accept the deal because it makes our type of people more valuable than some boogeyman-type of person. This works because once we accept that there is an evaluation function, as you say, nobody buys that it maps us all to the same point.

Re: What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

#30

Post by User23 »

club_tropical wrote: post #13
coldtea wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) There's also your body, in the arms and legs and torso sense, which is you, but it's not your brain. There's also your non conscious part (whether you want to include a Freud style subconscious, or autonomous functioning parts that reach a decision way before it has registered as a conscious though) which is your brain, but not exactly "you" as you think of you. Plus all kind of body-produced chemicals and hormone…

1) It sounds from what you write that you agree, even if reluctantly so, because "there is no diff". For completeness sake, I want to clarify that I believe in something far stronger than your reluctant resignation: that the whole conscious/subconscious separation, the body/head/hormone separation, that these are all artificial and wrong categorizations. There is one you, the whole you, no part meaningfully separable…

> There is one you, the whole you, no part meaningfully separable from the other, not "diff"able, because the hormones are not some external force acting on The Real You (TM) but a physical manifestation of The One You (TM). If you manipulate body/head/hormones, you literally change The One You, to varying degrees depending on the intervention, obviously.

Incidentally this is exactly Catholic teaching on the human person.

In fact I find it striking how in line with traditional Christian philosophy your judgments are. For example the need for a supernaturally provided moral code that’s comprehensible to us follows from the reality that the human intellect truly is incapable of conceiving the possibility infinite higher order consequences of our actions. Thankfully we have some basic heuristics like don’t kill people for no reason that help us out there.

Edit: child has lost the plot. The point is the limitations of the intellect create a need for a moral science.

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