= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
entirelyuseless comments on The Moral Void - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (105)
How do you get a statement with "shoulds" in it using pure logical inference if none of your axioms (the laws of physics) have "shoulds" in them? And if the laws of physics have "shoulds" in them, how is that different from having a tablet?
How many axioms do you have? Language has thousands of words in it, and logical inference will never result in a statement using words that were not in the axioms.
Notice that this doesn't prevent us from knowing thousands of true things and employing a vocabulary of thousands of words.
Sorry, but I'm not sure what your comment has to do with mine. Please expand.
You asked, "How do you get a statement" etc. I was answering that. In the same way we get all our other statements.
So, just to be clear, I was objecting to this part of TheAncientGeek's comment:
My comment was an attempt to point out (in a rhetorical way) that math requires axioms, and you can't deduce something your axioms don't imply. After all, there are no universally compelling arguments--and in the case of morality, unless you're specifically choosing your axioms to have "shoulds" in them from the very start, you can't deduce "should" statements from them (although that doesn't stop some people from trying). You can, of course, have your own personal morality that you adhere to (that's the part where you choose your axioms to have "shoulds" in them from the beginning), but that's a fact about you, not about the universe at large. To claim otherwise is to claim that the laws of physics themselves have moral implications, which takes us back to moral realism (i.e. an external tablet of morality).
Your comment is true, of course, but it seems irrelevant to my original objection.
It is not irrelevant. Physics does not contain axioms that have the word "apple" in them, and so you cannot logically go from the axioms of physics to "apples tend to fall if you drop them." That does not prevent you from making a reasonable argument that if the axioms of physics are true, then apples will fall, and it does not prevent you from arguing for morality.
This is an equivocation. "Apple" is a term we use to refer to a large collection of atoms arranged in a particular manner. The same goes for the word "bridge" that you mentioned in your other comment. The fact that we can talk about such collections of atoms and refer to them using shorthands ("apple", "bridge", etc.) does not change the fact that they are still made of atoms, and hence subject to the laws of physics. This fact has precisely no bearing on the issue of whether it is possible to deduce morality from physics.
EDIT: Speaking of whether it's possible to deduce morality from physics, I actually already linked to (what in my mind is) a fairly compelling argument that it's not, but I note that you've (unsurprisingly) neglected to address that argument entirely.
"Apple" is not used to refer to a "large collection of atoms" etc. You believe that apples are large collections of atoms; but that is not the meaning of the word. So you are making one of the same mistakes here that you made in the zombie argument.
People spoke of apples before they knew anything about atoms. Someone did discover at sometime that the entities that we call apples are made out of atoms.
If I would have a teleporter and exchange the atoms one-by-one with other atoms it would also stay the same apple. Especially when it comes to bridges I think there are actual bridges that had nearly total atom exchange but as still considered to be the same bridge.
Your comment is true, but it doesn't address the original issue of whether it is possible to deduce morality from physics. If your intent was to provide a clarification, that's fine, of course.