Sam Harris is here offering a substantial amount of money to anyone who can show a flaw in the philosophy of 'The Moral Landscape' in 1000 word or less, or at least the best attempt.
More accurately, he is "offering a substantial amount of money to anyone who can" convince him to publicly acknowledge that there is a "flaw in the philosophy of 'The Moral Landscape' in 1000 word or less." This is quite a different feat from merely finding a flaw.
Up to $20,000 is on offer, although that's only if you change his mind. Whilst we know that this is very difficult, note how few people offer large sums of money for the privelage of being disproven.
I'm not so sure this is a wise decision if you are trying to improve your epistemic rationality. What he has just done, is to give himself a $10,000 reason not to change his mind.
Sam did something similar on his tour for the book. He invited people to come up and correct his views on his book.
It's was either clueless, or fundamentally dishonest. Sam can add 2 and 2. The problems with his book, like most others, are primarily conceptual, and impossible to correct in a 30 second response to Sam after his lecture. He chose not to engage the professional literature on his rehash of utilitarianism and moral objectivism, and then invites people to correct him in a 30 second response to his lecture. Unserious.
I don't think any of his fundamental moves pass a laugh test. But it's extremely difficult to help a conceptually confused person see the error of their ways. We can't do it for him. He has to decide to face serious interrogation by his critics, where he attempts to clarify his own argument, and sees if he can do it. He's shown no indication of a willingness to do this. Instead, he'll just read essays, cram them into his conceptual confusion, and dismiss them, most likely claiming that they didn't understand his argument, where I'd argue that neither did he. What a pointless exercise.
Here's my response. I had a LW-geared TL:DR which assumed shorter inferential distance and used brevity-aiding LW jargon, but then I removed it because I want to see if this makes sense to LW without any of that.
This debate boils down to a semantic confusion.
Lets consider the word "heat(1)". Some humans chose the word "heat" to mean "A specific subset of environmental conditions that lead to the observation of feeling hot, of seeing water evaporate..." and many other things too numerous to mention.
Once "heat" was defined, science could begin to quantify how much of it there was using "temperature". We can use our behavior to increase or decrease the heat, and some behaviors are objectively more heat-inducing than others.
But who defined heat in the first place? We did. We set the definition. It was an arbitrary decision. If our linguistic history had gone differently, "heat" could have meant any number of things.
If we were lucky, a neighboring culture would use "heat(2)" to mean "the colors red and yellow" and everyone would recognize that these were two separate words that meant different things but ...
Constructing a response after reading his response to critics would be good. His core reservations presented seem to be:
If you can say that there's no correct morality, why can't you say that there's no correct math, or no correct science?
If there's two different visions of well-being, isn't this just a small difference? ("This is akin to trying to get me to follow you to the summit of Everest while I want to drag you up the slopes of K2" [...] "In any case, I suspect that radically disjoint peaks are unlikely to exist for human beings.&qu...
What can convince a philosopher to change her mind, anyway? I mean, it's not like there is an experiment that can be conclusively set up. Is it some logical argument she is unable to find a fault in? If so, then how come there are multiple schools of philosophy disagreeing on the basics? Can someone point to an example of a (prominent) philosopher changing his/her mind and hopefully the stated and unstated reasons for doing so?
Hilary Putnam, one of the most prominent living philosophers, is known for publicly changing his mind repeatedly on a number of issues. In the Philosophical Lexicon, which is kind of an inside-joke philosophical dictionary, a "hilary" is defined thus:
A very brief but significant period in the intellectual career of a distinguished philosopher. "Oh, that's what I thought three or four hilaries ago."
One issue on which Putnam changed his mind is computational functionalism, a theory of mind he actually came up with in the 60s, which is now probably the most popular account of mental states among cognitive scientists and philosophers. Putnam himself has since disavowed this view. Here is a paper tracking Putnam's change of mind on this topic, if you're interested in the details.
The definition of functionalism from that paper:
...Computational functionalism is the view that mental states and events – pains, beliefs, desires, thoughts and so forth – are computational states of the brain, and so are defined in terms of “computational parameters plus relations to biologically characterized inputs and outputs” (1988: 7). The nature of the mind is independent of the phy
The error with Harris' main point is hard to pin down, because it seems to me that his main fault is that his beliefs regarding morality aren't clearly worked out in his own head. This can be seen from his confusion as to why anyone would find his beliefs problematic, and his tendency to hand-wave criticism with claims that "it's obvious".
Interpreted favourably, I agree with his main point, that questions about morality can be answered using science, as moral claims are not intrinsically different from any other claim (no separate magisteria s'il...
note how few people offer large sums of money for the privelage of being disproven.
The usual reason for doing so is signalling: look how sure I am of my ideas, I am willing to put my money on the line. Most people who see this offer (aptly called a "challenge") won't hear "he would be happy to be disproven, what a rational fellow"; they will hear "he is sure he can't be disproven, what a confident fellow".
I haven't read Harris's book and don't know anything about it. However, I do feel that a genuine "challenge" ...
Well, now he has another reason not to change his mind. Seems unwise, even if he's right about everything.
I believe that many commenters here interpreted Harris uncharitably. He is not giving himself more reasons to not change his mind. He is not interested in an independent judge deciding who is right. He seems to want to genuinely figure out whether he is missing anything important -- to him! Not to other people. That's why he goes into a lot of effort to list, steelman and address all previously made arguments he can think of. If you think you have found an argument he did not bring up, he would likely be interested in hearing it. If you think that you have found an issue with his steelmanning attempt of an existing argument, he would likely be interested in hearing it.
I agree with Sam Harris on many topics, and I really enjoyed the Moral Landscape. If you need a proofreding sparring coach to tell you how they feel about your argument. I'm available for such task.
shoot me a mail at diegocaleiro at the provider gmail. I'll be glad to be shown why do people dislike Sam's arguments so much anyway.
I'd be willing to give this a shot, but his thesis, as stated, seems very slippery (I haven't read the book):
"Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds—and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe."
This needs to be reworded but appears to be straightforwardly true and uncontroversial: morality is connected to well-being and suffering.
"Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these tur...
Read the short FAQ underneath. At first glance it seems the book might be right about a lot of things. Damn.
I don't have the book, so I don't think I'm eligible for the prize. Suffice to say that I've read his summary on "Response to Critics", and anybody who can't refute the tripe philosophy shown there (maybe he's got better in the book, I can't be sure) doesn't deserve to be considered anything more than a crap philosopher.
EDIT: Making criticisms as I go.
1- There is a fundamental difference between the question of science and the question of morality. Scientific inquiry percieves facts which are true and useful except for goals which run directly c...
Sam Harris is here offering a substantial amount of money to anyone who can show a flaw in the philosophy of 'The Moral Landscape' in 1000 word or less, or at least the best attempt.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-moral-landscape-challenge1
Up to $20,000 is on offer, although that's only if you change his mind. Whilst we know that this is very difficult, note how few people offer large sums of money for the privelage of being disproven.
In case anyone does win, I will remind you that this site is created and maintained by people who work at MIRI and CFAR, which rely on outside donations, and with whom I am not affiliated.
Note: Is this misplaced in Discussion? I imagine that it could be easily overlooked in an open thread by the sorts of people who would be able to use this information well?