681–690 of 743 posts
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Do you have a known-good, rigorously validated consciousness-meter that you can point at an LLM to confirm that it reads "NO CONSCIOUSNESS DETECTED"? No? You don't? Then where exactly is that overconfidence of yours coming from? We don't know what "consciousness" is - let alone whether it can happen in arrays of matrix math. The leading theories, for all the good they do, are conflicting on whether LLM consciousness…
By that logic I cannot rule out the cosciousness of my water bottle either.
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objective truth moral absolutes I wish you much luck on linking those two. A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.
> That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. When is it OK to rape and murder a 1 year old child? Congratulations. You just observed a universal moral standard in motion. Any argument other than "never" would be atrocious.
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I think there are effectively universal moral standards, which essentially nobody disagrees with. A good example: “Do not torture babies for sport” I don’t think anyone actually rejects that. And those who do tend to find themselves in prison or the grave pretty quickly, because violating that rule is something other humans have very little tolerance for. On the other hand, this rule is kind of practically irrelevant…
Pretty much every serious philosopher agrees that “Do not torture babies for sport” is not a foundation of any ethical system, but merely a consequence of a system you choose. To say otherwise is like someone walking up to a mathematician and saying "you need to add 'triangles have angles that sum up to 180 degrees' to the 5 Euclidian axioms of geometry". The mathematician would roll their eyes and tell you it's alre…
"No torturing babies for fun" might be agreed by literally everyone (though it isn't in reality), but that doesn't stop people from disagreeing about what acts are "torture", what things constitute "babies", and whether a reason is "fun" or not.
So what does such an axiom even mean?
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"Slavery was right 200 years ago and is only wrong today because we've decided it's wrong" is a pretty bold stance to take.
Not "slavery was right 200 years ago" but "slavery wasn't considered as immoral as today 200 years ago". Very different stake.
Don't you see how that seems at best incredibly inconsistent, and at worst intentionally disingenuous? (For the record I think 99% of people when they use a point like this just haven't spent enough time thinking through the implications of what it means)
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Object-level rule: “Stealing is illegal.” Meta rule: “Laws vary by jurisdiction.” If the meta claim is itself a law, what jurisdiction has the law containg the meta law? Who enforces it? Object: "This sentence is grammatically correct." Meta: "English grammar can change over time." What grammar textbook has the rule of the meta claim above? Where can you apply that rule in a sentence? Object: "X is morally wrong." Me…
When "meta" claims have implications within the system they are making assertions about, they collapse into that system. The claim that there are no objective moral claims is objective and has moral implications. Therefore it fails as a meta-claim and is rather part of the moral system. The powerful want us to think that there are no objective moral claims because what that means, in practice, is do what thou wilt sh…
Knowing that 'the floor is made of wood' has implications for how I'll clean it, but the statement 'this is wood' is still a description or observation, not an instruction or imperative.
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objective truth moral absolutes I wish you much luck on linking those two. A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.
> That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. Actively engaging in immoral behaviour shouldn't be rewarded. Given this perrogative, standards such as: Be kind to your kin, are universally accepted, as far as I'm aware.
Natural human language just doesn't support objective truths easily. It takes massive work to constrain it enough to match only the singular meaning you are trying to convey.
How do you build an axiom for "Kind"?
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Using some formula or fixed law to compute what's good is a dead end. > To kill other members of our species limits the survival of our species Unless it's helps allocate more resources to those more fit to help better survival, right?;) > species limiting, in the long run This allows unlimited abuse of other animals who are not our species but can feel and evidently have sentience. By your logic there's no reason to…
> Using some formula or fixed law to compute what's good is a dead end. Who said anything about a formula? It all seems conceptual and continually evolving to me. Morality evolves just like a species, and not by any formula other than "this still seems to work to keep us in the game" > Unless it's helps allocate more resources to those more fit to help better survival, right?;) Go read a book about the way people beh…
In this thread some people say this "constitution" is too vague and should be have specific norms. So yeahh... those people. Are you one of them?)
> It all seems conceptual and continually evolving to me. Morality evolves just like a species
True
> keep us in the game"
That's a formula right there my friend
> Go read a book about the way people behave after a shipwreck and ask if anyone was "morally wrong" there.
?
> And yet we mostly do feel bad about it, and we seem to be the only species who does. So perhaps we have already discovered that lack of empathy for other species is species self-limiting, and built it into our own psyches.
or perhaps the concept of "self-limiting" is meaningless.
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Do not murder is not a good moral absolute as it basically means do not kill people in a way that's against the law, and people disagree on that. If the Israelis for example shoot Palestinians one side will typically call it murder, the other defence.
This isn't arguing about whether or not murder is wrong, it's arguing about whether or not a particular act constitutes murder. Two people who vehemently agree murder is wrong, and who both view it as an inviolable moral absolute, could disagree on whether something is murder or not. How many people without some form of psychopathy would genuinely disagree with the statement "murder is wrong?"
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Deontological, spiritual/religious revelation, or some other form of objective morality? The incompatibility of essentialist and reductionist moral judgements is the first hurdle; I don't know of any moral realists who are grounded in a physical description of brains and bodies with a formal calculus for determining right and wrong. I could be convinced of objective morality given such a physically grounded formal sy…
You can be a physicalist and still a moral realist. James Fodor has some videos on this, if you're interested.
I think we'll keep having human moral disagreements with formal moral frameworks in several edge cases.
There's also the whole case of anthropics: how much do exact clones and potentially existing people contribute moral weight? I haven't seen a solid solution to those questions under consequentialism yet; we don't have the (meta)philosophy to address them yet; I am 50/50 on whether we'll find a formal solution and that's also required for full moral realism.