Yep, but that's what happens when you want your conclusions to hold in every possible world.

>This is what most moral philosophy feels like to me: a detailed examination of a highly complex topic, which begins with "imagine something that doesn't exist."

The thing is that when we try and conceptualise morality we're always attempting to describe something that 'doesent exist' outside our conception of it.

Not OP, but modern philosophy has shifted pretty heavily away from the metaphysical, and most discussions require some amount of empiricism to hold any actual value.

Basically if the claims you're making can't be verified (or if they cannot be falsified) then they're generally disregarded, or they're analyzed further to see if there's any actual truth that can be verified/useful.

Meditations is not that. It's mostly a collection of bold statements that worked specifically for him. But even though they worked for this grand emperor, that doesn't mean they will work for you, or that they are the most correct thing to do, or that they're even relevant in a modern context.

I would say take Meditations as the musings of a pretty decent emperor, and do what people do with most religious/self help texts and pick the parts that apply to you.

And keep in mind that you're not a Roman emperor with advisors and a practically endless supply of wealth, and the ability to basically do what you want anyway.

And then read Hume, Locke, Russel, and my favorite: AJ Ayer.

So what do you advise in true philosophy?

My state passed a hands free laws after a cop rendering aid on the side of the road was clipped and killed by a distracted driver on the freeway. The driver said his phone was in his hands, the cop had a new born five weeks old so we passed the law. Then said people get two years before it's enforced to get used to it. It's been 5 and our cell phone issues are worse than ever. No one gets pulled over for distracted driving, and in my state it's just a monetary fine.

The words "save" and "world" need to be defined first.

Not sure how you could do that without some kind of artificial value system that is universal and needs no further justification.

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I think that the essay is too ambitious. I admire that ambition, especially given that English is not the author's first language, but there is an attempt to pack too much into this, and so, despite its length, it tends to rely on superficial assertions of facts. This results in an interesting contradiction; despite the main thrust of the essay being how many people hold their worldviews uncritically when they should engaged in deeper examination and reflection, the essay itself is uncritical of the myriad assertions it makes, and comes across as cherry-picking from the lengthy history of philosophy and psychology those select quotes that support the points being made, and dismissing all else.

This essay also indulges in the common trope of treating the whole of homo sapiens as if it were some sort of singular hive-mind, rather than a vast collection of individuals who see one another in different lights depending on their own worldviews. In other words, the author routinely refers to "we" to mean humanity writ large, rather than speaking of those people who fit the specific description. Because clearly, the "we" who "are stubbornly refusing to embrace our 'irrational side' and waiting for things to make rational sense" is not the whole of humanity, given the number of people the author quotes in support of their viewpoint.

And there is little point in positing some unenumerated percentage of humanity must go along with some random Substack essay in order to conclude that "we" are now right-thinking and properly cognizant of all of the factors that drive "us." Especially when there seems to be no allowance made for different cultures or circumstances.

>BENTHAM. Fair enough. But, even so, I worry that giving you the money would set a bad precedent, encouraging copycats to run similar schemes.

>MUGGER. Don't. This transaction will be our little secret. You have my word.

Fun thought experiment! I think the easiest way for utilitarians to respond is to zero in on this section.

1. In reality, giving into muggings like this will pretty much unavoidably encourage copycats. Naive act utilitarianism, funnily enough, does better in practice than in theory here.
2. In a world where Bentham's muggers exist and really do have a strict mugger-victim confidentiality agreement: The utilitarian thing to do would be to precommit to saying no to all muggings, tell a bunch of people about your precommittment, and then encourage all other utilitarians to do the same. If the Bentham's muggers know in advance that you're going to say no, they won't try to mug you in the first place.

The scenario seems like it's inspired by Newcomb's problem. A utilitarian who one-boxes in Newcomb's problem--i.e. who endorses a decision theory that tells them to one-box and to accept point 2 above--won't have any issues with muggers.

> If his critics were less emotional, if they were more stoic, if they understood Meditations, they they would agree.

This is the key point, not of just Aurelius, but of the majority of conversations/debates that take place in political discourse. Implicit within these debates is the notion that the opposing party lacks knowledge about a certain thing and they would change their mind (and political party/ideology) if only they were exposed to such knowledge. This is faulty thinking. As it has been mentioned recently on this subreddit, facts do actually care about your feelings, because feelings is what animates us into action and it is through these actions that political change occurs (for better or worse).

Likewise, learning/spreading knowledge is important, but it is the value-judgements that one has of the knowledge that they have which is more important. Value-judgements are buttressed by knowledge, but they do not create them/follow at 1-1 path. I could explain something quite well to someone, have more knowledge than them, impart it upon them, but that still not change their value-judgement. We all heard the quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” but I would not go as far to say that someone "refuses to change" when presented with new information. Does he have an obligation to change? Is that information actually correct, pertinent to the conversation?

Someone could present to me several novel facts about a topic that are interesting and important, but it no way change my value-judgment on the topic. In fact, that person may be trying to dislodge me from pursuing my material interests surrounding a topic by leaning hard into moral/ethical (but not material) reasons why I should vacate pursuing my material interests. In this case my value-judgement isn't really at all predicated upon knowledge, but an understanding of the zero-sum game I find myself within the political framework and the struggles that I have with others who are likewise operating within the very same zero-sum game.

In short, I am not obligated to "change" my value-judgement when someone presents what he thinks is novel information to me. It is not a sin of my own that I didn't change. Perhaps the speaker was not sufficiently persuasive, and should dwell within his own lack of virtue in this regard.

Why should we when we already know billionaires wants to think beyond our own planet?

The argument here is that we need to be aware of both our "instincts, emotions and feelings" as well as our rational mind. This is a view that's been supported by psychological research for a long time.

I think Compassion Focused Therapy does the best job at modelling all of this. Paul Gilber's "Living Like Crazy" would be good for anyone interested in this stuff

Really?

The way I read it, I would say the opposite with a title of

"Why we should stop thinking and just live by embracing our instincts, emotions, and feelings."

Very little philosophy in Meditations if you ask me. It's a self help book written by a Roman emperor.

He included much of the wisdom of his time, but its also just what he told himself to rationalize his own experience.

And the problem is that the author just vaguely appeals to "lessons" or "teachings," but then just poorly paraphrases them into modern language that suits him. It's very similar to how we hear appeals to the founding fathers, the same two hundred years old quotes that get dragged up in objection. They imply us to ignore the contradictions, accept the appeal to authority, and insist that it should only applies to this one topic.

But armed with a few quotes from the ancients and from the founding fathers, the twenty something political science major can now weather any criticism, because he is simply acting upon his stoic reflection. If his critics were less emotional, if they were more stoic, if they understood Meditations, they they would agree.

What right wingers often do when they appeal to Aurelius, is they purify their own intentions, elevating their political opinions to the status of revealed truth after they proclaim to have done the same hard work that Aurelius did.

The result is someone who thinks their own thoughts are pure, and everyone else's are hindered and impaired by emotion. And this can permit them to maintain indefensible ideals through any criticism.

Meditations is less philosophy, more self help/religion.

A better title for this article might have been "Why we need to think beyond our instincts, emotions, and feelings." I recommend Rationality by Steven Pinker.

I'll try to engage with the text.

Take this part of the exchange:

>BENTHAM. Fair enough. But, even so, I worry that giving you the money would set a bad precedent, encouraging copycats to run similar schemes.
MUGGER. Don't. This transaction will be our little secret. You have my word.

Say we accept the Mugger's claim. Wouldn't the Mugger repeat the threat of self-harm immediately after? The previous 10£ is already lost. What matters to Bentham is the future, so his moral calculus would be the same. That is, on the second iteration of the threat, Bentham must hand over another 10£. And so on...

So we run into an infinite regress. Say Bentham considers this option already at the first threat. He then does a calculus that assigns a non-zero probability to that the threat will continue until Bentham is required to give the Mugger more than what a finger is worth (assume a finger has finite utility). Bentham can then rationally reject the threat on basis that accepting the threat, we end up on a slippery slope that after some finite number of threat iterations of finite time leads to negative global utility.

The Mugger could then commit to that if given 10£, that would be the end of said threats of self-harm, to Bentham or anyone else. Now wouldn't we say that Bentham is right to fork up the cash? I'd say so. 10£ seems like a small price to pay to make the Mugger give up all future threats of self-harm (we assume here the Mugger is truthful). So maybe the Mugger should up the price -- why ask for a measly 10£ if it only can be done once? And now we are in familiar, but arguably unavoidable, "icky" territory of assining cash value to the physical well-being of individual humans. What price should Bentham (or the community) be willing to spend in order to prevent a certain self-harm of a certain individual among us? And we are back in territory where utilitarinism works pretty well.

So.... how well did I do? I think these one-shot moral dilemmas are tricky in that the reason they often conflict with our intuitions is because we think about the next step, the step after that etc. If the Bentham stand-in truly could know, or at least expect (given assigned probabilities) that there is one finite cost to accept for the removal of a negative utility, then our moral intuitions would line up with utilitarianism: there is a cash value we should be ready to depart from when that act removes a quantifiable moral ill.

The objection is simple and banal: Utility contains terms for things like "it's bad to give in to blackmail, as this leads to more expected blackmail in the future*" - consequentialism doesn't have to be short-horizon, blind and dumb. You assess all consequences of an act.

My personal objection (why I'm consequentialist but not utilitarian as usually defined): Caring about others' utilities is not something I have to do because of some Rawlsian argument; it's just something that's already in my utility function because that's how my brain evolved to be. You can do approximations that are equivalent to "weighting people's utilities" based on your thoughts, feelings, whims, their likeability, the uncertainty you have about them, etc. And those weights can be negative, because why not? Spite is also natural. If someone tries to threaten his own bodily integrity, see if I care.

^(*: even accounting for all the not-cut fingers, and for everyone's utilities and not just yours, the "giving in to lots of blackmail" future is worse than one where you don't, which does need to be argued for but isn't hard to argue. As opposed to e.g. "giving in" to win/win trades.)

That's fine, so long as you keep it to yourself, but then you don't get to make statements about what is and isn't useful. Because if you make assertions, that is to say you impose yourself on others, while also maintaining that truth isn't something to be worried about - then that's just a rhetorical way of trying to have your cake and eat it too.

But my point is that that doesn't matter. It is perfectly possible to think that something is subjective because you view seeing it that way as more useful than not seeing it that way. You don't need to worry about its truthfulness at all.

very nice thought and very nice written.

Well that was a joy to read, If I am ever homeless I can revolutionise the game.

I am reminded of something I once read, about physicists and spherical cows:

>Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, "I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum."

This is what most moral philosophy feels like to me: a detailed examination of a highly complex topic, which begins with "imagine something that doesn't exist." The practical applications of such an approach are nearly always flawed, on a fundamental level, because we're working from a place of fantasy.

Yes in that example you already have entanglement/decoherence in (2), at which point I’ve already said the multiple worlds must now exist. Sean’s language in that very article uses terms like ‘we expect the apparatus to become quickly entangled’ and ‘once our quantum superposition involves macroscopic systems’ and ‘proceed to evolve’ and ‘it is as if they have become distinct worlds’. They ‘come in to being’. They ‘occur’. All of the terminology implies the actions are happening over time.

Saying the possibility for all of the worlds is always there is not the same as saying all the worlds are always there. If that’s what is meant, the language should be clearer. Which I will find out.

And yes you were trying to explain ‘apparent collapse’ but you didn’t use that terminology, like the terminology Sean does in the article linked, you just described collapse multiple times, which isn’t happening. I was just pointing out that it’s not ideal and already stated what I assumed you meant, which is exactly what you apparently meant, but you are again doing the thing where you default to telling me I’m wrong when you actually completely agree with me but have an inability to accept your own fault. Kinda tiring tbh.

Edit: It just occurred to me that you said my objection is that there are too many universes. I didn’t realise you still don’t understand my point this far in 😩

As per suggestion, I will post here:

​

This is a summary of a philosophical and mathematical work by a former teacher and mentor of mine. The work attempts to describe mathematical structures based on philosophical concepts that could potentially be applied in physics. I first encountered this work as a mathematics student, but at that time, I couldn't understand most of it. With this publication, I hope to attract interested readers to this work.

Abstract:
"UrEins and Algebra - The Concept of the ONE.
Implications of the Concept of the ONE.

This work was jointly created between the years 2000 and 2006. It is a philosophical-mathematical work with possible outlooks on physics. Philosophically, it resolves the contradiction between the views of Parmenides and Heraclitus, on which Western metaphysics failed, as Georg Picht elaborated extensively in his posthumously published work "On Time". Additionally, it meets Picht's further demands to make at least one step out of the crisis of Western philosophy. Parmenides speculated and argued with the concept of the ONE, in which everything should be united. Heraclitus, on the other hand, claimed that only "movement in being" was essential, and there was no "rest in the ONE."
The "movement in being" corresponds to "water" and also "fire". This movement is also referred to as Heraclitean Logos. It should be noted that even today, the view is still largely held that there is "rest" in the ONE and no "movement."
Picht's work "On Time" is incredibly important for criticizing Western philosophy because he makes further demands, but cannot fulfill them. It seems to us that in general language, this appears almost impossible. What Picht calls "being in time," that overarching mode in which past, present, and future are summarized as a possibility, is the mode of reflection that is embedded in the cosmos. Being embedded in the cosmos also means "being embedded in the past, present, and future." For with the view into the spatial cosmos, we also look into the past and recognize dynamic processes there that point to the future. Moreover, it is considered an unsolved philosophical problem what the present is, which transforms an unknown future into unalterable past. This requires a philosophical justification of the "ticking" of time, which must be considered not yet found. We propose a suggestion for this. Although time is measured with clocks in physics, the "ticking" of time, as well as space in its three dimensions, are simply assumed and described mathematically above the continuum of real numbers. Of course, there are already conjectures that space and time could be quantized.
Beginning a "lattice theory" of space is being tested for elementary particle physics.
In our work, the mode of reflection according to Picht will be expanded with the linguistic possibilities of mathematics. However, it will not be done in such a way that mathematics is added as a language from the "outside" to expand the mode of reflection. Rather, essential parts of algebra arise from the mode of reflection. Permutations as mappings play the fundamental role. Finite groups are introduced as a result. From these, finite rings and finite algebraic fields, called Galois fields, are constructed through endomorphisms of finite, commutative groups as mappings. The concept of mapping is central. This meets Picht's demand to break the boundaries of Western metaphysics. A curious view of possible physics of space, time, and photons emerges, but not yet of matter.
The method outlined is open to extensions.
AUTHORS: Dieter Beckmann, born 1941 Studied mathematics and physics from 1962 to 1969 Teaching activity from 1969 to 2005.
Klaus Pullmann, born 1934 Studied mathematics and physics from 1954 to 1960. Teaching activity from 1961 to 1996."
pdf in Archive (It is written in German.)
https://archive.org/details/Ureinsundalgebra

Either we have to accept that we have minimal knowledge…

I’ve already accepted this. I would rather accept something is unprovable rather than make stuff up and then believe or disbelieve it’s true. This doesn’t mean I won’t entertain far out thoughts, rather my basis or starting point is one of knowing that we may never truly know the answer to unanswerable questions.

If we accept the former, we need some other epistemological basis to describe the majority of what we would like to say we "know".

I think where I describe in my last comment what I know and how you can know it too meets my criteria. It works for me. It’s basically what currently exists, ideally where everyone agrees to leave others to their own beliefs as long as it doesn’t harm others. If one wants to drink the koolaid then that’s on them, if they want to convince others to do that then I have an issue.

Edit Having said that, I understand the creative process behind discovery of the unknown and how technology and what is commonly accepted as being known is revealed/illuminated. If we limited ourselves to what is known then there may be little to no progress and advancement. I am mainly focused on pointing out unprovable philosophical scenarios and how they may prove to be good mental exercise in a way, but anything beyond working to understand and moving towards skewing to believe and I’ll pass.

Edit2 I know things and am open to being wrong. I understand now that I’d rather write something off as unprovable rather than participate in choosing either belief or disbelief.