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Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

openculture.com

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Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#411

Post by fzeroracer »

boffinAudio wrote: post #409
robertlagrant wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All culture is a lie which only persists in the re-telling. This seems wrong. It's not a lie to give something a name. Why not say "All culture is a truth which only persists in the re-telling", given it is true we call Europe Europe?

Europe doesn't exist anywhere in the world except in the fallacious minds of human beings. Gold exists. The sun exists. Gravity exists. Elephants exist. Europe does not. We cannot conjure up gold just by saying "gold shall exist!" - we can, however, lie to ourselves and say "Europe exists!", and - as long as the human mind is around to perpetuate it, this lie will persist. Gravity doesn't need the human mind to makin…

Well no, gold does not exist. Gold as we know it is a concept created by humans according to your argument, we call it 'gold' and define what is 'gold' purely by our own cultural experiences. There's nothing stopping us from calling lead gold and gold lead other than our own cultural experience.

If you want to take the idea that human culture is a lie and nothing exists, then empirical reality as we know it does not exist. The concept of 1 + 1 = 2 isn't based in reality but rather something humans made up.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#412

Post by mcv »

benpacker wrote: post #128
mcv wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT does feel a bit like a refutation of his life's work. Because whether or not ChatGPT can think, it certainly has a good command of language without starting out with an inborn sense of grammar. It learns grammar by copying. Just like kids do, I suspect.

Kids learn grammar by copying, but a group of kids with no language will invent one (see Nicaraguan sign language), and empty transformer models will not do this. Kids raised hearing a mix of French and African languages will also invent a new language (Haitian creole) and a LLM will not do this, it would alternate speaking one or the other. ChatGPT proves that language is not so complex that it can’t be modeled, but…

> empty transformer models will not do this.

Do we have evidence for that? Of course those kids did have a real world to communicate about, and that creates the need for a language. I think if you had AI models that had a world to interact with and other models to communicate with and learn from, they might be able to develop their own language too.

But this does get to another of Chomsky's points: the need to have a world model. To current LLMs, the only world model they have is text they read on the internet. And they only communicate with us, and I don't think they learn from their communication with us. So that's unavoidably limiting them. But I think it would be a very interesting experiment to give them a world to interact with and other similar models to communicate with, to see if they develop some sort of language (which would be completely incomprehensible to us of course; that's another hurdle).

I agree that LLMs don't disprove his inborn grammar argument, but they don't support it either. I think more research is needed.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#413

Post by drt5b7j »

so_delphi wrote: post #324
cuteboy19 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course if one is to learn about war crime denialism, who better to learn from than Cambodian genocide denialist Noam Chomsky? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom... Here we have a person denying eyewitness testimony of Genocide. Surely we all have to learn from such a great individual

And don't forget about Srebrenica too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial#Denial... He is garbage! EDIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCcX_xTLDIY

I didn't know this. I'm in shock right now. I already knew that "America bad" was a blind spot for him, but this is another level.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#414

Post by Molotokoto »

scoofy wrote: post #201

I think that the thing that most people don't realize about ethics is the meta-ethical problem that axioms are by definition arbitrary. When we really think about the fact that all of our ethical theories are based on arbitrary axioms, suddenly the teeth to ethics have a deep, serious problem. The only argument we have at that point is that the axioms "feel" correct, and I have no problem with this basis, I consider…

There are few thought experiments which would force you to a 'better' behaviour.

You don't know for example, if death is real or not (deah not real -> afterlife) which could bring up a few scenarios like you currently are supervised if you are 'good' enough.

Or the old idea of hell vs sky.

The best bet for you is always to be 'good' weird thing is people don't get it. The same issue with people getting asked if we should increase taxes for the rich people and they say no because they think they are affected by this.

Or a sentence someone once said: Don't teach kids playing footbal to win, teach them to play so that others want to play with them.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#415

Post by JackFr »

emptysongglass wrote: post #388
JackFr wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But basing your ethics on suffering rather than say some other model of virtue is arbitrary.

It's not arbitrary because suffering is universal and unwanted by those who experience it.

But that doesn’t make it a universal basis for ethics.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#416

Post by bluGill »

scns wrote: post #257
scoofy wrote: post #201

I think that the thing that most people don't realize about ethics is the meta-ethical problem that axioms are by definition arbitrary. When we really think about the fact that all of our ethical theories are based on arbitrary axioms, suddenly the teeth to ethics have a deep, serious problem. The only argument we have at that point is that the axioms "feel" correct, and I have no problem with this basis, I consider…

Well, since i shed the shackles of religion and am diametrically opposed to simply following leaders, i had to find my own definition of ethically correct behaviour. The question i ask myself: "Is my action beneficial to mankind and nature as a whole?"

Many people have kept slaves, even beating them to death - and still answered yes to your question. Many criminals in prison will tell you their victim deserved whatever.

I don't know how to define morality, but yours is not helpful.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#417

Post by MisterBastahrd »

pixl97 wrote: post #317
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religions require people to do stupid and harmful things all the time. They are extant to proper morality. People weren't just wandering around those societies and murdering other people in the same group without justification or punishment.

It's interestingly how you silently show that 'group' classification of humans allows any person to do any action they want to another person as long as they can find a means of putting them in a particular group.

I didn't "silently" do shit.

I explicitly pointed it out because it's been a part of human history since humans had a history. Declaring something exists is not the same as justifying that they've done it. We have Memorial Day to honor people who died to go overseas and kill people, and Veterans Day to honor the people who didn't die to go overseas and kill people. Would I consider that to be a gap in morality? Sure, but it exists AND it's not specific to the United States either.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#418

Post by dotsam »

tivert wrote: post #381
dotsam wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I put ‘we’ because institutions like legal systems are fundamentally collaborative, unless enacted by a total dictator. Popper’s grandparents were Jewish and he wrote one of his major works which explores these topics, The Open Society and Its Enemies, as an urgent response to the totalitarian ideologies and atrocities of WWII. Totalitarian ideologies do not permit open, critical pursuit of the truth, and so they can…

> I am wondering if it would have been better if I had written ‘solving problems is on balance a good thing’? Or do you think solving problems is on balance bad, or perhaps neutral? I don't think the "solving problems" angle escapes subjectivity. It seems like just obscured subjectivity.

It sounds like we both want to say that the holocaust is objectively wrong, not merely subjectively wrong. I don't know where best to start but I do think knowledge and problem solving are key to the answer.

There is objective truth about the physical world, and we work towards it by error-correcting and replacing our bad explanations with better explanations. Errors and bad explanations cause us problems, and we create knowledge to solve them.

Moral problems like the holocaust also require knowledge to solve. With more knowledge, we could have stopped the holocaust sooner. We can't just embrace ignorance and unreason and hope for the best, we need to create a continuous stream of knowledge to solve the continuous stream of problems we face.

You can't just commit to any subjective moral values you feel like and hope to have continual success in knowledge creation. Unbounded knowledge creation requires commitment to moral values such as tolerance, openness to criticism and change, and respect for truth. Blind obedience to authority, rigid acceptance of dogma and commitment to infallible final solutions are all morally bad and limit our ability to make continual progress.

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#419

Post by bluGill »

emptysongglass wrote: post #393
harperlee wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example, surely you are aware about the ongoing discussions about whether abortion is ethical? Do you think people are just playing mental games for fun when they discuss that? Do you really think that it is not two different ethical systems clashing?

No I don't think people are playing mental games for fun. I think debates like these are not centered on the individual and their own responsibility to their and another's suffering. In the case of abortion it's still the case that the mother is engaged in her own inquiry of harm. Notice how I've not brought myself into the picture. That doesn't mean it can't be a complex inquiry but it is still her own inquiry and i…

You have completely ignored the babies suffering here.

Until you can recognize in cases of abortion there are two parties with different interests we cannot make progress. (we probably cannot even after understanding that, but maybe we can be civil)

Re: Chomsky explains why nobody is a moral relativist

#420

Post by bluGill »

speak_plainly wrote: post #173
31337Logic wrote: post #167

I admire Chomsky but I'm afraid this particular argument isn't very convincing. He merely asserts his position but does nothing (substantial) to defend his position. In what way is moral relativism a logical contradiction? "...even if you’re the most extreme cultural relativist, you are presupposing universal moral values. Those can be discovered.” That's not true at all. I don't presuppose universal moral values. An…

It's a logical contradiction in a simple way: If you assert that 'moral relativism is true' that itself would be a relative claim which would undermine the assertion as a universal position. Further, you end up in a position of equivalence of all claims and generate major contradictions. I will go out on a limb on the universal moral values claim and I think again it's pretty simple: The existence of even the most ba…

1+1=2 (standard arithmetic)

1+1=10 (base 2 arithmetic)

1+1=11 (base 1 arithmetic)

1+1=11 (string concatenation)

1+1=true (+ often is used for AND in boolean arithmetic)

1+1=0 (mod 2 arithmetic)

Those are just what I think of in 3 minutes. I know there are others that I can't remember at the moment, and I'm sure there are even more that I've never encountered in my math studies.

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