Unknown comments on My Strange Beliefs - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 December 2007 12:15PM

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Comment author: Unknown 31 December 2007 05:49:59AM 0 points [-]

Nicholas, Sam Harris's study of belief and disbelief employing MRI scanning seems to indicate that the human brain considers moral statements to be true or false in the same way that it considers mathematical or factual statements to be true or false.

Of course one can argue that the brain is wrong, but since one will continue to possess a human brain, one will still think and act as though the statements were true or false in the same sense. So humans will treat disagreements about values in the same way as other disagreements, even if on a meta-level they deny the equivalence. Eliezer pointed this out himself when he said that making a moral claim like "murder is wrong" feels like stating an objective fact; it feels this way because on the level of the brain, it is exactly the same as stating an objective fact.