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All of Diagonalore's Comments + Replies

Restricted Antinatalism on Subagents
Diagonalore21

When considering this topic I think one has to contend with the notion that suffering and well-being can't carry symmetrical weight. 

The idea that they're not things you can combine into one value with the hopes that the sum ends up being positive. That in fact suffering just exists in the negative domain of qualia, and no amount of positive qualia can "cancel it out", unless the two are experienced simultaneously (in which case I don't think I'd consider that to be actual suffering). 

I'm currently undecided on the merits of antinatalism for a va... (read more)

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What is the strongest argument you know for antirealism?
Diagonalore00

I appreciate your input, these are my first two comments here so apologies if i'm out of line at all.

>Roughly speaking, you're saying that the ground-truth source of values is the self-evidence of those values to agents holding them. 

In the same way that the ground-truth proof for the existence of conscious experience comes from conscious experience. This doesn't Imply that consciousness is any less real, even if it means that it isn't possible for one agent to entirely assess the "realness" of another agent's claims to be experiencing consciousnes... (read more)

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1Jay
I'm suggesting there's a common denominator which all morally relevant agents are inherently cognizant of. This naturally raises the question of whether people who don't agree with you are not moral agents or are somehow so confused or deceitful that they have abandoned their inherent truth.  I've heard the second version stated seriously in my Bible-belt childhood; it didn't impress me then.  The first just seems ... odd (and also raises the question of whether the non-morally-relevant will eventually outcompete the moral, leading to their extinction). Any position claiming that everyone, deep down, agrees tends to founder on the observation that we simply don't - or to seem utterly banal (because everyone agrees with it).
2ChristianKl
In this rebate "real" means objective which means something like independent from observers. Consciousness is dependent on you observing it and the idea that you could be conscious without observing it seems incoherent. The moral realism position is that it's coherent to say that there are thinks that have moral value even if there's no observer that judges them to have moral value. 
What is the strongest argument you know for antirealism?
Diagonalore00

There's a counterargument-template which roughly says "Suppose the ground-truth source of morality is X. If X says that it's good to torture babies (not in exchange for something else valuable, just good in its own right), would you then accept that truth and spend your resources to torture babies? Does X saying it's good actually make it good?"

I'm not sure if I'm able to properly articulate my thoughts on this but I'd be interested to know if it's understandable and where it might fit. Sorry if I repeat myself.

from my perspective It's like if you appli... (read more)

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2johnswentworth
I actually don't think this is a statement of moral realism; I think it's a statement of moral nonrealism. Roughly speaking, you're saying that the ground-truth source of values is the self-evidence of those values to agents holding them. If some other agents hold some other values, then those other values can presumably seem just as self-evident to those other agents. (And of course we humans would then say that those other agents are immoral.) This all sounds functionally-identical to moral nonrealism. In particular, it gives us no reason at all to expect some alien intelligence or AI to converge to similar values to humans, and it says that an AI will have to somehow get evidence about what humans consider moral in order to learn morality.