All of Jakub Supeł's Comments + Replies
Quite apart from the application of this argument to AI, the example of a gun shop/manufacturer is quite bad. One reason is that passing on the negative externalities of selling a gun without passing on the positive externalities* (which is never done in practice and would be very difficult to do) creates an assymetry that biases the cost of firearms to be higher than it would have been in rational circumstances.
(*) Positive externalities of manufacturing and selling a gun include a deterrent effect on crime ("I would rather not try to rob that store...
I agree! I don't think consciousness can be further analyzed or broken down into its constituent parts. It's just a fundamental property of the universe. It doesn't mean, however, that human consciousness has no explanation. (An explanation for human consciousness would be nice, because otherwise we have two kinds of things in the world: the physical and the mental, and none of these would be explicable in terms of the other, except maybe via solipsism.) Human consciousness, along with everything physical, is well explained by Christian theism, according t...
The statement that they are potential lives is incorrect. An embryo is already alive and, since it has continuity through time with an adult human being (obviously actual living human), it has human identity as well. Therefore, it is a living human being.
"Only one life can come out of this process" is also incorrect. This is like having 4 teenagers and choosing 3 of them to be shot, and then concluding that "only one adult can come out of this process, therefore the 3 teenagers are merely potential lives and can be destroyed".
Why would inherent moral worth depend on the number of neurons or complexity of the brain?
1the existence of decision-making beings is the best thing ever
I didn't say it's the best thing ever. Why are you misrepresenting what I said?
Effects caused by natural laws aren't "caused by God". They are caused by natural laws. It's not the same thing. God did create natural laws, but they serve a number of good purposes as I began to outline above.
what caused the evils of the Thirty Year War?
Struggle for power between the Habsburgs and France?
Oh, an one more thing. My updated premise 2 is:
2'. Whenever John says that X, then X. ( ∀ X:proposition, says(John, X) ⇒ X )
Note that X here is not a statement (grammatically valid sentence?), but a proposition. John can express it however he likes: by means of written word, by means of a demonstration or example, by means of a telepathy, etc. There is no need, specifically, to convert a proposition to a string or vice versa; as long as (1) is true and we most likely understand what proposition John is trying to convey, we will most likely believe in the correct normative proposition (that, if expressed in a statement, requires an "ought").
"It's all for the best in the end" is not a good argument, no. Such things are justified because the kind of world that serves the purposes God had in mind when creating it (for example, world in which moral agents exist and in which their choices are meaningful, i.e. make a practical difference) requires regular and predictable natural laws, and these (again, in the presence of meaningfully moral agents) have the side-effect of causing suffering from time to time. People have the option of committing good or committing evil, and these options are open to ...
Ugh, you are using the language of programming in an area where it doesn't fit. Can you explain what are these funny backslashes, % signs etc.? Why did you name a variable fmtstr instead of simply X?
Anyway - statements obviously exist, so if your theory doesn't allow for them, it's the problem with your theory and we can just ignore it. In my theory, every sentence that corresponds to a proposition (not all do of course), if that sentence is utterred by John, that proposition is true - that's what I mean by John being truthful. There is no additional axiom here, this is just premise 2, rephrased.
"we find out that we used the axiom true(QUOT[ought(X)]) ⇔ ought(X) from the schema. So in order to derive ought(X), we still had to use an axiom with "ought" in it."
But that "axiom", as you call it, is trivially true, as it follows from any sensible definition or understanding of "true". In particular, it follows from the axiom "true(QUOT[X]) ⇔ X", which doesn't have an ought in it.
Moreover, we don't even need the true predicate in this argument (we can formulate it in the spirit of the deflationary theory of truth):
2'. Whenever John says that X, then X. ( ∀ s:proposition, says(John, s) ⇒ s )
What about that thing where you can't derive an "ought" from an "is"? Just from the standpoint of pure logic, we can't derive anything about morality from axioms that don't mention morality. If you want to derive your morality from the existence of God, you still need to add an axiom: "that which God says is moral is moral".
The hypothesis that we can't derive an ougth from an is is not a proven theorem. In fact, it is easy to prove the opposite - we can derive an ought only from purely descriptive statements. Here is how we can do it:
- John says that I
God is not a human. Why would the moral duties of humans be applicable to God?
Edit: unless you meant "God is evil by those moral standards that govern human behaviour". In which case I agree. It's not a very useful statement though. An omnipotent and omniscient being who is a creator of everything has more moral freedom to do to his creation as he pleases. For example, he gave us life (unlike our parents, he is the ultimate creator of it), so he also has the right to take it away.
One flaw with your argument though...
eventually you may see the private prison industry die
you seem to think it would be a good thing? Why?
Commenting here to explain how I voted on this comment (since it was unusual): downvoted the comment and agreed with it. I think the point stands that LW often misses things others have done and it's worth connecting them, but downvoted for being snarky about it. Yes, reinventing things is a thing LW is notorious for, but I personally don't want to see a social dynamic take hold like exists on sites like Hacker News and many subreddits where people become afraid to post because they'll get harsh comments.
"And yet there are these regular causal connections. These are causal connections (in both directions) between kinds of brain event and kinds of mental event, so detailed and specific that it is most improbable that they would occur without an explanation; yet it is immensely improbable that there could be a scientific explanation of the connections. Mind–brain connections are too ‘odd’ for science to explain; they cannot be consequences of a more fundamental scientific theory, and there are simply too many diverse connections to constitute laws. But once ...
Since qualia don't have any influence upon the external world and qualia are not caused by the physical world, then qualia must have a causal history that is independent of the physical world. The best explanation is that they are created by a mental substance which all of qualia-possessing beings have, the best explanation of which is God's creative action.
Qualia don't serve any evolutionary purpose. They don't have any causal influence on the external world at all. Which is also why we may never know whether animals have qualia (unless someone like God reveals that information to us).
How do you explain the fact that the state of the mind known as "seeing color" has the property that it cannot be accessed/observed by anyone except its owner (I hope you know what I mean by the "owner"), while the neuronal excitations can be observed by anyone in principle? Doesn't it mean that colors are not neuronal excitations?
"there is a mental state of "experiencing green", which is a certain functional state of a mind"
Alright... now, how do you explain the fact that this state of the mind has the property that it cannot be accessed/observed by anyone except its owner (I hope you know what I mean by the "owner"), while the properties of the brain can be observed by anyone in principle? Doesn't it mean that e.g. the image in the mind is not a brain process?
I'm confused. Do you think you don't actually have mental experiences?
Only a handful of Nazis believed in pagan religion. Most notable was Himmler. Hitler, afaik, considered it silly and distracting from the main cause.
Why do you think that "a god that deliberately and knowingly created a world like this is evil by normal moral standards"?
It would have conscious qualia.
Color is not a shape?
There is no such thing as 'green" in the physical universe (obviously). It has no explanatory power, it has no causal power, and there is no viable theory of how it can be produced by other things (e.g. by light of whatever wavelength, since my experience of light of that wavelength could be different than yours). Yet, we know that "green" exists. Therefore dualism.
Green is not a wavelength of light. Last time I checked, wavelength is measured in units of length, not in words. We might call light of wavelength 520nm "green" if we want, and we do BECAUSE we are conscious and we have the qualia of green whenever we see light of wavelength 520nm. But this is only a shorthand, a convention. For all I know, other people might see light of wavelength 520nm as red (i.e. what I describe as red, i.e. light of wavelength 700nm), but refer to it as green because there is no direct way to compare the qualia.
I'm not sure how the first two paragraphs are analogous to consciousness at all. Yes, the screen prints out numbers. These printed numbers are still mere physical entities. The screen doesn't really produce the number Pi from the physical objects, it just manipulates the physical objects. Consciousness is not about manipulating physical objects, as two identical physical configurations could correspond to two distinct conscious experiences.
As for something being "green", we can detect "green" with webcams and computers. My Gimp as a "anti-red eye filter" that can not only detect a kind of red and even its shape, and remove it. Being green is a very physical property of light, or of matter that emits/absorbs light. There is even less dualism in that than in my Pi example, or in any other kind of file (text, pictures, sound, movie, ...) stored in a hard disk.
Haha, no. Strictly speaking, we cannot detect "green" with webcams or computers (such an expression is only a simplification). We can det...
Oh, so then the question should be "What would I think about these arguments if I hadn't already committed myself to faith and I were an open-hearted truthseeker?". Your claim is that:
1) such a person should consider arguments for the Christian faith to be good, on balance (otherwise "Christianity is greatly wounded"), and
2) such a person often would not consider arguments for the Christian faith to be good.
Why do you believe (2)? That is, how can you know what a sincere seeker is going to think of any particular argument? Or, even worse, about all the arg...
The thought patterns you cite are not universally demanded by religion. They might be demanded by some religious people sometimes, but they are by no means a universal feature of religion. So, as a never-religious atheist, your perception of religion does seem to be skewed. In my experience with religious people, I very rarely encounter the kind of attitudes you mentioned.
Why does objection 1 seem valid to you? Something like "Jesus rose from the dead" is not obviously false; it is in fact true and has good evidence of being true.
What's wrong with not following epistemic rationality then if there are no moral truths? If there are no moral truths, it doesn't matter whether you are rational or not; no option is better than the other.
The claim that religion is a separate magisterium that can neither be proven nor disproven is a big lie indeed. But it is not the lie of RELIGION per se. Some religious people believe it (perhaps more than in the past) while many others don't. Just as some non-religious people believe it and some don't.
Why would this question be relevant? Let's say that the answer is "I would think that the arguments in favour of religion are stupid". What is that supposed to prove?
Why do you consider religious faiths to be obviously untrue? "They would be child's play for an unattached mind to relinquish, if the skepticism of a ten-year-old were applied without evasion." Why do you consider the questions of a ten-year old to be unaswerable except through evasion? On the contrary, such questions are almost invariably easily answerable to anyone who has the slighest knowledge about philosophy of religion and the doctrine of their particular religion. I would be silly to be guided by the questions of a 10-year old instead of the a...
There are some a posteriori reasons though - there are numerous studies that reject a causal link between the number of firearms and homicides, for example. This indicates that firearm manufacturers do not cause additional deaths, and therefore it would be wrong to only internalize the negative costs.
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