Again, I find this perspective quite Euro-centric. When evaluating a system, the degree to whether people intentionally created it or not, whether it comes from a coherent philosophy or not, is irrelevant. For example, humans evolved through an unintentional process over millions of years, and yet somehow our brains, at least as far as we know are among the most complicated things we know about. Is the fact that the process was unintentional even remotely relevant to its complexity or capacity? Of course not.

Indigenous systems often do evolve unintentionally because their users are focused on outcomes, such as surviving---and by definition any surviving indigenous group/culture possesses such systems. There are classes of knowledge valued by scientists called Local Knowledge that encapsulate how indigenous people happen to, through just surviving on the land for generations---develop sustainable practices, an understanding of the thousands of relevant species around them, and their major interactions with themselves, other species, and the environment itself. It isn't that this came from some noble philosophy given to them by some religion---it came because they survived and they needed that knowledge, which is often passed down from generation to generation to do so. Learning about it, specifically from a scientific perspective and how to integrate those systems of knowledge which weren't developed intentionally into an intentional practice that CAN be done intentionally, IS super important.

Yes, you are right, not every indigenous group has Local Knowledge and not every group has ideas or conceptions of reality that different from the ones that modern humans have, but their history of survival and the adversity of their experience has shaped them in a way that the majority of people living in Western consumption oriented societies can learn from and given that so much of that history is colored in the evils of colonization and rampant exploitation SHOULD learn from.

It's not technology. It's unregulated capitalism. Technology can used for good purposes or not. Capitalism is inherently destructive and wasteful, and it feeds into our primitive base emotions. Capitalism exploits, among many things, technology.

How the hell is the golden rule supposed to solve any conflict where cooperative benefits are inevitably unequally distributed? What benefits are even cooperatively produced so that the distribution of them can be dependant on the participation in cooperation.

But yeah how does empathy work in general? Does the rich take the shoes of the poor or does he take the shoes of the poor in the shoes of the rich?

Shaming can be used opportunistically for the pursuit of any aim. From the viewpoint of autonomy we should not seek for honor because it depends on others.

“I suspect that some critiques of his philosophy are oftentimes subconsciously motivated by a desire to evade the guilt at how much better we Westerners are than the vast majority of the people on this planet. It's easier to pat ourselves on the back for social media posts than it is to donate the majority of our incomes to charities.”

100% this. The Singer solution to world hunger causes a lot of cognitive dissonance in us well-to-do Westerners. Most of us see ourselves as good, unselfish people, but the truth that we aren’t doing nearly as much as we ought as individuals leads to much psychological discomfort. The easiest way to dispel that discomfort is by attacking rejecting Singer’s solution.

But many scientific models are based around philosophical theses. In sociology for example, the ground concept for the tragedy of the commons to work , is the assumption that humans rather act in the way that they have the most individual utility, rather than acting in a way that makes everyone benefit from it. What is beneficiary for the collective is always better for the individual (pareto optimum). This entire theory though is an excerpt of reality that ignores its causes and consequences, it is based around metaphysics. Philosphy itself may not be scienfic, but it influences sciences a lot.

He was also an ardent Nazi. Ahh the duality of man

Agreed. A lot of people commenting don’t seem to be too familiar with Singer’s work. As someone who has read most of his books, I can say it’s crazy to paint him as anything other than a good old lefty, who’d like nothing more than to see the sort of political changes likely favored by the authors of this hit piece.

Yeah, life was a lot better a few hundred years ago when all this stupid shit wasn't around and people could just peacefully go about dying from simple dental infections. Those were the days my friend

Well, I'd be very interested to hear about this "mountain of evidence" that we're living in an era of extreme temporary abundance". What kind of "evidence" could even show that?

That’s why Singer stresses the importance of donating to particular organizations, like GiveWell.org, which measures the effectiveness of various charities and ranks them according to their impact. He has never advocated just giving to any old charity.

I gotta say, the commenter is right that the truth lies between the noble savage and your we are all the same, always alternative.

My point is that however sustainable indigenous peoples were and are is usually due to accidents of technology, not due to some philosophy. And there was nothing sustainable about the Aztecs, for example. They were literally a colonialist empire like the British, consuming in similarly destructive ways. On the other hand, some farming societies, or hunter gatherer societies were relatively static, just like farming in Ireland or Poland for more than a millennia.

It's just an accident of technology.

And, for what it's worth, today there are people like you who care about sustainability, and have access to tremendous technology to help create sustainability on a scale that no Mohawk could dream of. You, today, can do more good for the environment than anyone living 1000 years ago. That's important to recognize, just as it's important to recognize our destructive power as well.

And I meant for you to read my comment there.. it's just that it's basically impossible to explain this in brief, without accusations of having missed "something".

Jacobin: Singer is the Philosopher of the status quo

Bing: Singer is considered to be one of the most influencing living thinkers however he was also called as the best-known vegetarian, and the most dangerous man in the World.

My people lived here for tens of thousands of years without destroying the whole place. Your people annihilated the continent in 500 years.

You are operating on a massive assumption that the public good is best served by government spending via taxation. The Gates foundation, by any measure, has way more bang-for-buck than equivalent public programs. Viewing wealth as antithetical to charity is a depressing view since the government you love so much has several orders of magnitude more wealth than Gates yet floundered with similar projects. I would much rather polio be eradicated by Gates foundation than wasting that money in a federal pit.

There are charities that work toward systemic change so it's just a false dichotomy.

That's still assigning an instrumental value to things, and thus still the kind of "technology" that Heidegger disliked. Though it would be a much better world than the current one, if that was done.

Nobody but Stalin claimed achieving socialism, and you can believe him if you'd like I guess.

Smith was describing, not prescribing, economics. Maybe you should read him?

My guess is that Singer knows he’d alienate these billionaires if he came off as too socialist. Given his pessimism about systemic political change, he probably sees the choice as between:

(A) Billionaires donate large sums of money to aid organizations to help worst off + No systemic political change

Vs

(B) Billionaires don’t donate their money + No systemic political change.

Perhaps his pessimism is unwarranted and he should reject both (A) and (B) as the only options. But until he’s convinced of another option, (A) is obviously the better choice, and it’s the choice that Singer is making, by not being too critical of billionaires.

That's an interesting point. I think it might be because it is also a certain conquering of nature, an impressive scientific accomplishment of physics make an iron bird fly. I think telescopes, missions to the moon and certain other technological projects in the name of discovery or merely accomplishments (e.g. the space race) can maybe not be as accurately described by this and provide a different category of technology all together. Heidegger, in his "the question concerning technology" talks about demanding resources from nature, but I do not see how a telescope is demanding anything.

You just disproved yourself with that source, I do not understand what you are trying to say here. I really want to know, I don't mean to discredit you.

Yup, still a genius that more or less defined the early continental philosophical tradition along with Husserl and later Wittgenstein though.

Have to say that, personally, I think his ontology of being-in-the-world as an alternative to the subject/object (or mind/body) system is still revolutionary today though. Hard to understate his contribution to philosophy (massive influence on Satre).

But the man is morally repugnant. His mentor, Husserl, who more or less invented the philosophical system of phenomenology (which Heidegger heavily based his philosophy on) was a Jewish man, who he basically betrayed to get in with the Nazis. Terrible human being, and yet a proper once-in-a-generation type philosopher. Humans are complicated and Heidegger took that truth to the extreme.

> Sorry I'm talking about after it's been born and raised. I think we should definitely assume that a grown adult born from an artificial womb has feelings. Though whether the zygote feels is definitely an interesting question too!

Ya I know, I was just teasing pro-choicers (no offence intended if you are one). :)

> Curious if you have any examples here. I have a pretty wide/open metaphysical view--I'm not even particularly committed to realism or physicalism.

As luck would have it, here's one:

> But a world with a hard wall against artificial consciousness would be especially weird

The world is as it is - you are referring to your perception/perspective upon it. If it so happens to be that there is, in fact, a "hard wall against artificial consciousness", that is normal, not weird - it only seems weird.

A common saying for this phenomenon is: "It's turtles all the way down!", but I propose this is also (slightly) incorrect - I would say: "There are turtles throughout the stack" - "is" implies something different, and introduces ambiguity that may not be noticed (people often conflate "is" and "equals").

> You'd need something along the lines of a divine decree to stop it...

That is only if it is in the state you think it is and wanted to change it to a different state. But you do not know if the state you think it is in is the state that it is in. Strangely, it may also be impossible for you to know this! But if you're the guy that writes the blog, I have a feeling you can pull it off! 😋

> ...because you would somehow need to differentiate between brains grown in a human womb and brains grown in a laboratory. The lab can get arbitrarily close to recreating the human womb, up to and including cloning.

Technically, it is not known how close they can get to anything in particular, particularly when it comes to (comprehensive) consciousness (which tends to not allow itself to be seen in a non-distorted manner - now that's weird, imho).

> This seems like a very nihilistic view of truth.

Epistemic strictness does seem to have that appearance, I hear it regularly (but not as often as solipsism).

> You could use the same argument to deny pretty much any line of reasoning.

Close, but not quite. You could use it to question the epistemic soundness of any line of reasoning, but if one was to use it to deny a claim (for which the truth is not known(!)), you would then be committing the very same error, except from the other side.

> It's pretty clear the the earth is not flat, but there's plenty of disagreement there too. Should that stop us from discussing geophysics?

I don't see why it should, and I certainly made no such recommendation.

> Same with Jan 6.

When you say "same", are you using the dictionary meaning ("identical; not different"), or the colloquial meaning ("it seems the same, according to my methodology: sub-perceptual heuristics")?

> There are a lot of facts on the table, and conclusions that can be drawn from them.

Are the conclusions epistemically sound?

Has a competent epistemic analysis of the various claims even been done? [As an aside: does it not seem more than a little strange to you that among all The Experts that guide us, nowhere are (genuine) philosophers to be found, particularly those who specialize in logic and epistemology?]

> Some people--even a majority--might loudly disagree with those conclusions, but that doesn't make them false or "unknowable".

Right: it is the fundamental falsehood (if that is the case) and unknowableness that makes it unknowable. And to make it even harder: consciousness often does not allow access to "it is unknown", presumably due to evolution (but I suspect culture and school curriculum might have more than a little to do with it).

> (Note that I'm not including political narratives, like who deserves punishment or blame, as these are statements based on values, not facts....

Mostly agree, except: your list is non-exhaustive, but you've made no explicit acknowledgement of that.

> ...value statements are indeed unknowable).

Perhaps, but I doubt as unknowable as it may seem!

>> A plausibly even bigger question: to what degree is it optimal that we are even pursuing this [particular goal in the first place, all things considered? Or maybe an even more important question: have we even stopped to consider that question? Just how is it that "humanity" "decides" what it is that we should be doing, and what we should not be doing, anyways? I don't recall that topic being covered.

> I sympathize with this. But I tend much more towards descriptivism over prescriptivism.

Me too, hence my lack of prescription (innuendo is in the perceptual layer 😋).

> IMO these are things that will happen, no matter what you and I think should happen.

We shall see about that.

> Very sympathetic to this feeling. We never vote on the Authority, but it does seem to be consensus-driven.

I have no issues with (actual) democracy, but when it proceeds beyond that to redefining the nature of reality itself, as a "fact", with or without doing it under the guide of using the supreme methodology for truth discovery (doing it this way seems to be the choice...and strategically, it's a shrewd move)....well, this is where my patience runs out. (Actually: j/k - Luke 23:34 and all that).

> Science is at least better than the Catholic Church, in that it doesn't physically torture dissenters. It just publicly ridicules them.

I would say that depends on how one practices epistemology, and how deep one analyzes causality (if one is even aware of that phenomenon - once again: culture and school curriculum, a big part of the causality that underlies me being a conspiracy theorist).

> I'm hopeful a new Authority will emerge over the next century or so. One informed by science but not driven by it.

I am far more ambitious: a new methodology or norm emerges, but:

a) not based on authority

b) using whatever works, rather than artificially constraining oneself to a known (by some) to be incredibly flawed, and not even designed for the problem space in the first place methodology like "science" (and what we'd "probably" get IRL is not science, but The Science, like during COVID).

Also: I think hope is insufficient - someone has to make it happen.

It's certainly plausible that I am biased or have some error in my thinking, so I welcome and encourage you to point out any errors you see in my statements (while doing so: please distinguish between the statements themselves and your interpretation of them).

It’s unnecessary to eat the way many people do. The money wasted on fine dining, alcohol and sweets can save plenty of lives. People don’t like to acknowledge that they’ve probably let a few people die in order to live a life of relative luxury.

And while his sibling example is reductionist, it’s easy to understand most people don’t want to dedicate months or years of their life to try and rehabilitate their addicted family member. And those people seek solace in the form of thinking that there was nothing they could do.