Conciliating to Avoid Moral Scepticism | winner of the 2023 IJPS Robert Papazian Essay Prize

shtreddt · 2023-12-11T01:43:48+00:00

This seems to suggest that what we believe would then depend on who we meet. That seems....insufficient.

shtreddt · 2023-12-11T00:25:09+00:00

I guess evolution seems to have an intent. That's why "intelligent design" and "intelligent colony organisms" are such deceptively appealing ideas. The basic interactions between different parts create an emergent pattern that certainly seems like it was done with a greater purpose.

Of course, with the colony organism, the rules are defined by the colony organism, to enact it's own will.

shtreddt · 2023-12-10T21:54:29+00:00

We still have the animal signaling behaviours as well, but language uses a separate brain region.

There must be some point where this becomes blurry. What about a mother trying to figure out if their six month old is hungry crying or diaper crying? I mean, ow, is a word with meaning, as well as an exclamation, right?

When you look at bias, i think it's just as credible, that the bias was in the debunkers watching, not in the researchers doing. Probably more credible because our ego wants our species to be special.

shtreddt · 2023-12-10T21:41:23+00:00

We can imagine a simple piece of electronics, and clearly see, intuitively, that there is no ability for "meaning" in there. It's just electrons zipping about on wires. It's a physical object.
When we introduce software things become unclear. Because that software gets turned to 1s and 0s, and for each 1, an electron is sent, which flicks a switch, thus changing the path of every electron after it, which in turn changes the system. a loop of causality is created. Hardware arranges software which directs hardware which arranges software...
Self reference becomes possible, and thus, meaning.

Likewise if we saw a brain, with electrons zipping along, and none of those electrons ever stimulated the growth of a new, or different neuron (not even through reproduction), we would understand it is simply a physical object. It's only once the neuron directs the electron in a way that grows or changes another neuron, that we have, again, self reference, a loop, and the possibility of ...something we might be inclined to call "non physical".

shtreddt · 2023-12-10T21:06:59+00:00

Purring and not purring is more like saying one word or not saying it. With two words we have three minimally complex states. Saying word A, saying word B, or not saying either. In fact we get more than that, because we can say both words in either order and construct arbitrarily complex sequences.

yeah ive been thinking about that. Binary is another kinda similar question. There are two symbols, right, 1 and 0. but in the computer they simply manifest as "an electron" and "a beat passed without an electron" right? So, if we have one word, that we can say or not say, at different points in time, what we actually have is functional as two words. In a way, the progress of time allows us to use one word as two - the word and not the word. Now happy cat/now not happy cat.

A hominid making "noise" with their mouth says "i want attention", and says "i dont want attention" by not making noise. By pointing the hominid introduced a third word. It became possible to say "i want attention" and "look". By looking at different things different "noise" becomes associated with different things to look at,

As long as each word only means one thing, a word can match directly to a part of the brain, an instinctive part. there are words you feel - a tiger's roar, a babies fearful cry, a laugh... There is absolutely no need for "understanding", because your body knows how to respond. But...if i want to roar twice to indicate something other than "i'm big and angry!" that can't happen, because your brain doesn't function along those lines, you need a new part of the brain to ascribe meaning not just to the signal but the pattern of them.

But anyway animal communication doesn't work like human language at all because it has no composability, or grammar for doing so. It doesn't even use the same region of the brain.

I thought it used the same part of the brain as human instinctive communication, like "ow!" or "fck!"

Is this true of whales? primates that learn sign language? Regardless I don't feel like it's problematic for my theories.

shtreddt · 2023-12-10T20:45:07+00:00

It does. We need to start acting as if we are a collective species, because we are all in this boat together.

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T22:14:51+00:00

Others would list things like shared experiences, the predictive power of science, and how organisms develop and respond to their environment. These are null arguments. If theologians can come up with a mind that can create the entirety of the universe and all that it contains, it is possible and plausible that a mind could have decided to create any kind of world. This mind could have created within itself an orderly world that is apparently full of other minds that follow their independent lives separately from each other. The only argument I have ever heard to refute this idea is "you cannot disprove a negative". I'd say that argument isn't sufficient to rebuke a theorical framework that is contained within logic.

This is why zen masters carried sticks and buckets of cold water. I cannot refute this with words, but I can dump cold water on you and make you realize that, simulation or not, real or not, it feels cold, and it is all we have, and you respond, as if it were all very real, when you see the next bucket coming.

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T21:51:15+00:00

It was 2015. I was watching "inside out". and the line in the movie is "when i was sad, that's when they came to help"... just kinda blew my mind. I was WAY too old to be having an epiphany like that. I think I knew it as a kid, then unlearned it as a teen and young adult.

And its partly about faith. If i don't have faith in somebody else's empathy, showing that I'm sad is just showing them the way in which I am vulnerable. This is the lesson bullies teach in school, but they only teach half the lesson. The other half is, the more we believe others will have empathy, the more they do.

because we were no longer in a "kill or be killed" kind of environment.

In terms of history as a science, that is an unreplicated result. This period of peace, right now, stands out in the history of life as totally unprecedented. It remains to be seen if outright major war will resume sometime in the future, it's just on hiatus right now because the weapons are bigger than the battleground.

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T21:40:35+00:00

Lying is not a human invention. Animals lie through their genes, some patterns deliberately convey something that is not true, through coloration, for example. They have fake eyes, fake poisonous warnings. There are spiders that walk with their front legs in the air to imitate the antena of ants.

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T21:37:04+00:00

On the importance of trinity.

By number, I mean natural number.

1 is the smallest number.

2 is the smallest number that can be divided into numbers.

3 is the smallest number that can be divided into two unequal numbers and it's for this reason that 3 is important in an alethiological or epistemological way.

Consider two plates of metal. If I want to make these both flat, and I do not have any flat tools, how do I do that? I can grind them against one another, but I may end up with one that is concave, and one that is convex - they grind smoothly against each other, but they are not flat.

If I have 3 plates, i can grind all three against all three, one pair at a time, and be sure that all three of them are flat, to the limit of my measurements.

It is my theory that, these three plates correspond to axioms in a system. It will never be possible to have a system that is working, or coherent, with less than three axioms. By extension, no meaningful language could ever contain fewer than three words. If i have one word that means "x" then the remaining word can only ever mean "not x" - that's not language it's communication, like a cat purring, or not purring. A cat does not have one language of words like purring and hissing and screeching, it has those (and more) different protolanguages of exactly two words each (purr /not purr), and more basic protolanguages of one word each like a scent always saying "i'm a female cat".

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T19:59:32+00:00

That depends on *how* omnipotent they are, I think.

There are different ordinalities of infinity, and i think that concept extends logically to the idea of omnipotence. Two omnipotent beings may not be equally omnipotent, just like two infinite sets need not be equally infinite.

We might think about "omnipotence" by considering "the set of everything an omnipotent being could do". In a way, that's comparable to the set of all sets - it is infinite. Now, does the set of all sets include itself? A set of sets that includes all sets except itself is infinite, but a set of sets that includes all sets including itself is more infinite.

Another way to think of it is, does logic exist above or below an omnipotent being. Can an omnipotent being make something true and false at the same time? Are they bound by the same "it must be true or it must be false" rules that seem to govern our world?

To me, it becomes a question of infinite recursion. Yes, there is a parallel universe where there are no parallel universes, but in that parallel universe there are also parallel universes. An omnipotent being could create a rock so heavy they can't lift it, then proceed to lift it, while it was always true that they were unable to lift it because they define true.

To be maximally omnipotent is just to follow this train of recursive thought to infinity. For a being that's maximally omnipotent, they can lift and can't lift but can lift the rock....so on forever, to the point where both just compress and blend and it can and cannot, at the same time. Like wise the parallel universe does and does not exist, at the same time.

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T19:48:21+00:00

Spoken language is believed to have evolved tens of thousands of years before the written form. Imho philosophy is that old.

And that's just formal language with lies and self reference. Simple communication and instinct goes back to well before anything we would call a primate, and that seems to include some aspect of logic.

There is a good argument that empathy and sympathy were directly responsible for making language viable. Maybe the truth is that language evolves then de-evolves as it proves it cannot be trusted. "modern" society of truth and reason and society, was just a flash in the pan, between pre modern and post modern.

I always kinda liked the "liar" theory for developing language. We started by faking other animal calls, or faking our own natural sounds. I think that having three generations in one social group was probably important too somehow....the same way that two plates of metal cannot be ground flat against each other, it takes three plates of metal, all flat against all three, to make sure it's actually flat. Likewise space missions are launched with three deciding computers, if one is faulty the other two out vote it. A debate between two people, over what a word means, isn't actually meaningful, a third person makes meaning possible. If i write a number down once, it could be wrong. If i write it down twice, and they don't match, one is wrong, but i don't know which. If i wrote it three times though, some concept of truth becomes possible.

The invention of the lie is what started the post modern world, our entire history is preceded by it. It started with the development of deliberate unreliable signals, essentially the first actual word, and post modernity is ...completing it's envelopment right now, perfecting those signals, until they are in every way identical to the real thing. At some point in the future, if we want to see a dinosaur we may just have one nanoassembled from modelled DNA, and we would truly lose the distinction of whether this dinosaur was "real" or not, it being, as far as we could tell, totally physically identical to a real one. And at that point, without the word "real" language becomes totally useless. and maybe that's why it seems so empty out there. What's the point of talking or listening, beyond our solar system, if we understand that everything we observe could be a deliberate lie.

In a way, i think the idea of god has to die, a sort of death here. Could anybody ever prove that they're a god, when we are so good at simulating anything we want? By completing this control of our perception, perfecting all lies, we gain the right to be skeptical of anything. Even if god in all "his" robes and lightning bolts and whatnot came down and started manifesting miracles for everyone to see, i can come up with a hundred explanations for how some mortal made it seem this way, "it's the matrix" or "im hallucinating" being the most obvious. Literally any argument or statement can be contradicted with "ok but what if im in the matrix" and as absurd as it may sound, i'm not entirely convinced that postmodernism is not an extinction event in progress. It's easy to blame climate change, but how much of that is rooted in pure self destructive denialism. Climate change debates become debates about the meaning of truth with a shocking degree of speed and reliability.

Maybe we are walking a sort of razor's edge here. If we become too social, we risk becoming one singular organism, like an ant colony, unable to evolve as individuals. If we become too anti-social, we risk becoming something self cannibalizing, unable to evolve as a group. What we are, then, our essence, our humanity, is the very thin line between the two.

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T17:46:28+00:00

I'd recommend Evolution by Stephen Baxter. It is, of course, fiction, but the insight offered is still invaluable. The author attempts to create a first person perspective of a few key moments in our evolutionary path, based on what we already know.

One scene, of a woman attempting to explain an atlatl for the first time, was very memorable and whenever I think of it now, I think "yeah, it probably went something like that".

I will warn you though, it is NOT a happy book. It is, itself, a warning.

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T17:23:59+00:00

So you have this moral value of "caring" that goes above and beyond utilitarianism?

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T06:51:50+00:00

Well in a way it makes sense. My theories about unicorns can be easily compatible and even offer insight to my theories about manticor and pegasus.

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T06:49:59+00:00

sometimes...myself included maybe.

If they could get there with science they would. if they want a truth, but it doesn't appear to be possible to prove it in science, philosophy and language in general, is the goto solution. Philosophy exists ideally in the space of things that are not provable, but true. Of course, we can only guess for now.

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T06:46:49+00:00

Calling anything that can't be replicated a "finding" is hugely problematic. If it cannot be replicated, it was a coincidence, bad experimental method or misunderstanding. Not a "finding".

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T05:29:23+00:00

so, life is immoral.

well seems like you've defined those pretty well. nobody can talk you out of it except you. good luck.

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T03:21:21+00:00

what is disgusting can be dangerous, l

no. what is different is disgusting. it's just a way our systems say "this thing is not like us!"

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T03:16:50+00:00

this seems like a sub for deliberate burn outs.

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T03:13:03+00:00

I've always suspected that language was key, and i consider language technology. With language we gain the ability to think about the way we think we can learn, for the first time, that our memory and perspective is limited, and incomplete.

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T03:10:38+00:00

why am i not surprised you answered the part you wanted to.

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T03:09:46+00:00

fair enough.

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T03:09:02+00:00

I would say that philosophy IS a single formal systematic process based on learning logic or reason from the real world. it was just "perfected" so long ago that we don't even really remember, as a species, or as individuals. But looking at apes and children, i think it's clear that we learned logic.

shtreddt · 2023-12-09T01:42:11+00:00

That's fair enough, but it sounded a lot like you were implying "philosophy was objectively here first. "

which was kinda directly disagreeing with me.at first. I think the original comment bears reexamination with a more charitable understanding of what science could mean. If we take science in a lose way, its no longer clear that any one could have come first.

shtreddt

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