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JamesCole comments on The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality and What To Do About It - Less Wrong
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Comments (113)
forgot - there was another observation i had.... this one is just quick sketching:
regarding the idea that 'moral properties' are projected onto reality.
As our moral views are about things in reality, they are -- amongst other things -- forms of representation.
I think we need a solid understanding of what representations are, how they work, and thus exactly what it is they "refer" to in the world (and in what sense they do so), before we'll really even have adequate language for talking about such issues in a precise, non-ambiguous fashion.
We don't have such an understanding of representations at the moment.
I made a similar point in another comment on a post here dealing with the foundations of mathematics - that we'll never properly understaand what mathematical statements are, and what in the world they are 'about' until we have a proper theory of representation.
I.e. i think that in both cases it is essentially the same thing holding us back.
No one said anything in response to that other comment, so I'm not sure what people think of such a position - I'd be quite curious to hear your opinion...
There is a lot known in metamathematics and formal semantics, so you'd need to be more specific than that.
I don't think there's anything that comes close to giving a theoretical account of how mathematical statements are able to, in some sense, represent things in reality.
Again, you need to be more specific. If you assume certain models of reality (sometimes very reasonable for the real world), there are notions of describing/representing/simulating that system, finding or proving its properties. Physics, graphical models, etc.
that is exactly what you can't assume if you want to explain the basis of representation.