The BSB stance here reminds me of the attitude I saw growing up in fundamentalist Christianity. This sort knod wink wink where they thought everyone deep down knew “the truth” and they were just denying it. It’s infuriatingly condescending, and it’s almost impossible to rebutt because the more you protest the more they see it as evidence of denial.
I love you! But I also bristle at all the hard work we do when it could be said another way (in my humble opinion.) I don’t expect anyone to endorse MY way of saying it. That’s not how this game works. But I’ll settle for just injecting these ideas into the world without acknowledgement. I’ve already been beaten up my whole life and made fun of and marginalized so I don’t care anymore.
It’s basically this: start with experience. Recognize pain/pleasure. Increase wellbeing / reduce suffering (IWRS) emerges from empathy, and empathy emerges (or not) from being a creature with qualia and predictive patterning, mirror neurons, dorsolateral PFC, a balanced amygdala, et al. No appeals to stance-independent “oughts” needed. Coherence and capacity scales it, carried by the natural gravity of IWRS. The end. Stop swatting at realists using their language. Free yourself from that loop.
You are on the right track when you say “I don’t care if it’s objectively wrong. I just care about what feels wrong to me.”
But it needs to be followed up with this:
“What happens when our empathy scales? What do our preferences converge on when we clarify our internal motivations?”
Do that. The only blockers at that point are biological. I hate to say it because it divides us but it’s true.
You don’t need to build a whole epistemic fortress to say why you don’t want to hurt puppies. But you can’t just say “I don’t want to hurt puppies, or gas 6 million Jews, ergo it’s just wrong.”
That will NEVER work. Just stop.
Get wise to “valence realism.” IWRS. “Infamous step 5.” Start using it in your arguments. Fuck analytic realists. They are not the target anymore. You are burning up too much energy and preaching to choirs.
If we want to survive the “great filter” in the next 100-200 yrs we need to stop moralizing and start engineering bc puppy torture isn’t “wrong” because of abstract properties, instead it FEELS wrong and undesirable bc of how most brains process suffering.
That feeling can be MEASURED, bitchezzzzz! Scaled. We need to do it with scalpels and drugs, not philosophy or religion.
Mapped and tuned to a natural E. The real battle is bio!
We will need to universalize empathy circuits, deprogram cruelty, and build systems that reward sentient stability. Absent that we may as well dig a ditch and lay in it. Or accept that the multi-planetary species musk is building is going to be a fucking numbed-out social Darwinist dick.
My theory of IWRS maps the universal attractor we HAVE. Help me or build a better one.
But do me the honor of engaging. Everything else is choir preach and wasted energy tbh.
This was great. I agree with pretty much everything you said, but in particular appreciated the subtlety of the exploration of issues such as whether you might actually care if you discovered moral realism were true, because of the knock-on effect it would have on all sorts of ancilliary beliefs. A really nice point.
Thanks. This one was a lot of work. BSB isn't responding to me so I'm probably muted. That's too bad. I think BSB has made some serious and pervasive mistakes and would benefit from seeing what I have to say.
BSB's argument was poorly expressed, but I don't think he's entirely without a point.
Suppose, arguendo, that moral judgements are found to be explained by two hitherto unknown types of radiation, mu and anti-mu. Humans are also discovered to have detectors for both types, and their effect is such that the higher the mu/anti-mu ratio, call it mu score, an event has, the more clearly right or good it is judged to be; and the lower the ratio, the higher its wrongness.
It this case you, as an antirealist, would clearly be wrong, since there now is an objective property whose perception accounts for our moral judgements. Moral perception, then, is a sense much like vision or hearing and similarly reliable. However, if I've understood correctly, you'd still say it's a category error to insist that you should care about the mu score because saying something is good or bad equates merely to expressing one's preferences, whatever the origin of these preferences. But then imagine that your mu/anti-mu detector starts malfunctioning, reporting false mu levels and making you think puppy torture is quite wholesome, actually. Do you think it wouldn't even now be at all useful to know what the real mu score of puppy torture is?
>> But then imagine that your mu/anti-mu detector starts malfunctioning, reporting false mu levels and making you think puppy torture is quite wholesome, actually. Do you think it wouldn't even now be at all useful to know what the real mu score of puppy torture is?
This is going to depend on facts that aren't specified yet. Among other things I'd need to know whether I'm wrong that I subjectively care about things and can accurately judge what it is I care about and don't care about. If we replace all subjective cares with mu detection, I'd need a bunch of empirical questions answered about how human motivation works, whether I care about things, and so on.
Can you explain a Catholic opposition to homosexuality if they say something like "I actually like homosexuality and want it to happen but I abide by Catholic teaching just like I actually like the idea of the Sun revolving around the Earth and wish it to be true but I abide by Science teaching."?
While a person may not care about moral laws themselves, they may care about moral law enforcement.
Also, do you think moral anti-realism is compatible with theism? If so, what does it mean for God to be perfectly good? Here is one way of cashing that out: while God may not be objectively perfectly good, God can be subjectively perfectly good to all if God brings everyone to convergent belief that He is perfectly good.
"I am opposed to puppy torture and am motivated to stop it because I don’t like it and don’t want it to happen. I then label this opposition “wrong.” It’s bottom-up, not top-down. "
Here you provide what seems like the most definitive characterization of the comparison you want to make.
But earlier, you characterize both BSB's view and yours as 'bottom-up' in rapid succession. (adjacent paragraphs, IIRC)
So I infer that you intended to characterize BSB's view as *top-down*.
The BSB stance here reminds me of the attitude I saw growing up in fundamentalist Christianity. This sort knod wink wink where they thought everyone deep down knew “the truth” and they were just denying it. It’s infuriatingly condescending, and it’s almost impossible to rebutt because the more you protest the more they see it as evidence of denial.
I love you! But I also bristle at all the hard work we do when it could be said another way (in my humble opinion.) I don’t expect anyone to endorse MY way of saying it. That’s not how this game works. But I’ll settle for just injecting these ideas into the world without acknowledgement. I’ve already been beaten up my whole life and made fun of and marginalized so I don’t care anymore.
It’s basically this: start with experience. Recognize pain/pleasure. Increase wellbeing / reduce suffering (IWRS) emerges from empathy, and empathy emerges (or not) from being a creature with qualia and predictive patterning, mirror neurons, dorsolateral PFC, a balanced amygdala, et al. No appeals to stance-independent “oughts” needed. Coherence and capacity scales it, carried by the natural gravity of IWRS. The end. Stop swatting at realists using their language. Free yourself from that loop.
You are on the right track when you say “I don’t care if it’s objectively wrong. I just care about what feels wrong to me.”
But it needs to be followed up with this:
“What happens when our empathy scales? What do our preferences converge on when we clarify our internal motivations?”
Do that. The only blockers at that point are biological. I hate to say it because it divides us but it’s true.
You don’t need to build a whole epistemic fortress to say why you don’t want to hurt puppies. But you can’t just say “I don’t want to hurt puppies, or gas 6 million Jews, ergo it’s just wrong.”
That will NEVER work. Just stop.
Get wise to “valence realism.” IWRS. “Infamous step 5.” Start using it in your arguments. Fuck analytic realists. They are not the target anymore. You are burning up too much energy and preaching to choirs.
If we want to survive the “great filter” in the next 100-200 yrs we need to stop moralizing and start engineering bc puppy torture isn’t “wrong” because of abstract properties, instead it FEELS wrong and undesirable bc of how most brains process suffering.
That feeling can be MEASURED, bitchezzzzz! Scaled. We need to do it with scalpels and drugs, not philosophy or religion.
Mapped and tuned to a natural E. The real battle is bio!
We will need to universalize empathy circuits, deprogram cruelty, and build systems that reward sentient stability. Absent that we may as well dig a ditch and lay in it. Or accept that the multi-planetary species musk is building is going to be a fucking numbed-out social Darwinist dick.
My theory of IWRS maps the universal attractor we HAVE. Help me or build a better one.
But do me the honor of engaging. Everything else is choir preach and wasted energy tbh.
https://www.stellastillwell.com/p/im-saying-it-again-differently-in?r=1xoiww&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Or the personal setup:
https://www.stellastillwell.com/p/elegy-for-an-instinct?r=1xoiww
The canonical theory:
https://www.stellastillwell.com/p/its-time-to-go-there?r=1xoiww
This was great. I agree with pretty much everything you said, but in particular appreciated the subtlety of the exploration of issues such as whether you might actually care if you discovered moral realism were true, because of the knock-on effect it would have on all sorts of ancilliary beliefs. A really nice point.
Thanks. This one was a lot of work. BSB isn't responding to me so I'm probably muted. That's too bad. I think BSB has made some serious and pervasive mistakes and would benefit from seeing what I have to say.
BSB's argument was poorly expressed, but I don't think he's entirely without a point.
Suppose, arguendo, that moral judgements are found to be explained by two hitherto unknown types of radiation, mu and anti-mu. Humans are also discovered to have detectors for both types, and their effect is such that the higher the mu/anti-mu ratio, call it mu score, an event has, the more clearly right or good it is judged to be; and the lower the ratio, the higher its wrongness.
It this case you, as an antirealist, would clearly be wrong, since there now is an objective property whose perception accounts for our moral judgements. Moral perception, then, is a sense much like vision or hearing and similarly reliable. However, if I've understood correctly, you'd still say it's a category error to insist that you should care about the mu score because saying something is good or bad equates merely to expressing one's preferences, whatever the origin of these preferences. But then imagine that your mu/anti-mu detector starts malfunctioning, reporting false mu levels and making you think puppy torture is quite wholesome, actually. Do you think it wouldn't even now be at all useful to know what the real mu score of puppy torture is?
>> But then imagine that your mu/anti-mu detector starts malfunctioning, reporting false mu levels and making you think puppy torture is quite wholesome, actually. Do you think it wouldn't even now be at all useful to know what the real mu score of puppy torture is?
This is going to depend on facts that aren't specified yet. Among other things I'd need to know whether I'm wrong that I subjectively care about things and can accurately judge what it is I care about and don't care about. If we replace all subjective cares with mu detection, I'd need a bunch of empirical questions answered about how human motivation works, whether I care about things, and so on.
Can you explain a Catholic opposition to homosexuality if they say something like "I actually like homosexuality and want it to happen but I abide by Catholic teaching just like I actually like the idea of the Sun revolving around the Earth and wish it to be true but I abide by Science teaching."?
While a person may not care about moral laws themselves, they may care about moral law enforcement.
Also, do you think moral anti-realism is compatible with theism? If so, what does it mean for God to be perfectly good? Here is one way of cashing that out: while God may not be objectively perfectly good, God can be subjectively perfectly good to all if God brings everyone to convergent belief that He is perfectly good.
i think one of you is supposed to be taking a top-down approach, but both descriptions say bottoms-up
Oh you mean there's a typo or mistake in the article?
See this:
"I am opposed to puppy torture and am motivated to stop it because I don’t like it and don’t want it to happen. I then label this opposition “wrong.” It’s bottom-up, not top-down. "
Here you provide what seems like the most definitive characterization of the comparison you want to make.
But earlier, you characterize both BSB's view and yours as 'bottom-up' in rapid succession. (adjacent paragraphs, IIRC)
So I infer that you intended to characterize BSB's view as *top-down*.