I replied to your post already to be honest it’s not a very good argument …..

Simply put, the argument is:

1:Philosophy is the search for truth,

Yes

2:And if Christianity is true,

And if Palmistry is true

3:Then Philosophy will (likely) find Christianity.

Then Philosophy will (likely) find Palmistry

So the amount of rsources is not a physical matter question? It is literally the first question of justice.

> The defining thing about liberals is the diversity of ideas and opinions.

Relative to conservatives maybe, but conservatives aren't exactly known for their deep thinking.

> Is signaling how angry you are at someone accepted as a refutation of their arguments, and the arguments of anyone else who is somehow loosely associated with something named after them?

That seems to be the case as far as I can tell.

> It can count all the resources and possibilities...

Science tends to only study physical matters, whereas many possibilities lie in the metaphysical realm.

Here’s a question: you say that the good must derive from reducing suffering and promoting bliss.

Is there anything valuable/morally relevant in people in themselves, independent from their capacity as experiencers of suffering or joy?

If the answer is yes, then it seems like reducing suffering and promoting bliss is not the ultimate good, since we value people in themselves, not just in their capacity to experience bliss. Maybe the implication of valuing a person is that we want to reduce their suffering, but it doesn’t seem obvious that that’s the only morally relevant implication, and utilitarianism therefore gives us an incomplete picture of what it is to attend to human worth.

If the answer is no, then the idea that we should care about suffering and bliss seems silly. We want to reduce suffering, but we don’t actually care about the person suffering, as such? We just have an abstract crusade against suffering qua suffering, but we don’t assign innate value to the people we want to bring out of suffering into bliss?

Utilitarianism is only capable of valuing people insofar as they are experiencers of suffering or joy. That is, it can’t give a morally coherent picture of humans as a whole—of embodied, relational, non-fungible, agentic beings that are morally significant in their own right.

Scientists must learn to accept the possibility of the very simple conclusion, that Einstein was wrong. Logic states that we do not know all the physics that exist in the universe. And that very likely in order to understand the universe we will have to rewrite many of out existing theories to accommodate what turns out to be reality. We would very likely have made much more progress with physics by now if instead of trying to get the data to fit our scientific theory, instead working to create new theories to fit the observations. But any alternative theory of science that even hints that Einstein was wrong is cast out as laughably wrong in the modern academic world. Unfortunate.

I enjoyed your post. It motivated me to look at your previous posts and I found your e-book, which I hope to find more time for soon.

I would like to ask a basic question about your methodology.

You seem to make little distinction between the population of humans through time and an individual human being situated at specific moment such that the history of even that individual is secondary to an analysis of the specific subject.

For example, in this post you say:

>There is a basic existential pressure within every organism to do the
things that will lead to an increased chance of thriving, surviving
and/or reproducing.

Certainly an individual at a specific instant may experience a drive to survive, but this is just one among multiple motivations competing for salience among many others. For much of the time, today, it is quite dormant due to lack of threats. Similarly, many spend most of their time uninterested in reproducing because what was once an instrumental goal has now been disconnected from its origin by the availability of contraceptives. The fact that the goal can be analyzed as instrumental matters less than that it figures so centrally in the programming of the human machine as it exists now.

Survival is a selection-oriented statistical drift within a population rather than in individuals.

I see that from your starting point you seek to explain the broader picture, but that serves as a genealogy of morality. Would it not be better to start with the individual as they are at a specific moment and proceed to their goals, limitations and frustrations?

Thank you. This interview really made me rethink things in a good way.

Thank you this summery helps tie things together for me.

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I'm not an expert (I came across this during a lit review on "emergence" in philosophy and found it refreshingly quantitative), but here's my take-away:

Say you're a scientist and you're trying to model some system. The general, reductionist assumption is that the best you can do is always going to be having a complete model of the micro-scale. Sort of a Pascal's Demon kind of thing. If we had enough knowledge and computing power, we could solve biology by just reducing it to a bunch of quantum mechanics problems.

But the world doesn't seem to work that way. Macro-scale objects in biology seem to have a "causal power" of their own. When you say, idk, you got sick with the flu, it doesn't really "feel" right to say that your illness was "caused" by a bunch of interactions between atomic orbitals or whatever. The illness can be modeled pretty much perfectly in terms of "macro-scale" interactions between the bug and your biology. So even if Pascal's Demon could do it all based on particles, he doesn't apparently need to.

What (I think) the authors are arguing is that we can understand this in terms of redundancy. There's not really any point in modelling every atom in a flu virus because they are, for the most part, totally redundant. If you wanted to predict the future of the illness by modeling every atom, you'd be doing something hugely wasteful, since two atoms in the shell of the virus capsule basically contribute the same thing.

So what the authors do is show that (in a bunch of silly, toy systems), you can "coarse grain" a system (sort of like lumping all the atoms together and saying "we don't care about individuals, just the structure you're part of"), and in doing so, that redundant information about the future copied over many elements gets "converted" into "useful" information specific to macro-scale elements.

I'm a bit fuzzy on this "synergy" construct - I'm not sure where that fits in.

Extremely enlightening! Found this very helpful and thought provoking. Thank you PJ for bringing Dr. Reynolds on to open our eyes to the many facets of living with disabilities/chronic pain and to be aware of the biases we inadvertently hold and explaining how to be forward thinking and our part in this community

You are hilarious. Positioning a lack of access to a type of food someone is fond of as more cruel than life (and death) in a factory farm.

I'd say you cannot be serious, but in actuality that arugment is emblematic of the age old foundation of every unjust relation: the idea of an intrinsic right to domination over others. Under that paradigm, the only tyranny you're capable of recognising is the deprivation of your right to opress whichever others are in the crosshairs this time.

>When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

Also, your spiel on slaughterhouse workers is a non-sensical ramble. Firstly, none of those other jobs are entirely centred around non-stop horrific acts from 9 til' 5. Secondly, the horrific acts are not comparable, not even if you believe killing animals for food is justified. Vets and Doctors are ultimately helping humans and non-humans. Slaughterhouse workers are abusing, harming and killing animals for a commodity to be sold. It's a fucking horrible job, you wouldn't want to do it. Which is exactly why there are no support structures, the only people willing to take the job do so because they have no choice, a good portion of precarious immigrant workers and even prison labourers are involved. Do you seriously think anyone cares what trauma they go through?

In this interview, Dr. Joel Reynolds discuss the ableist assumptions and conflations that undermine the dignity and rights of disabled persons. Dr. Reynolds also shares how their work (and their own story) highlights the ways in which the lived experiences of disabled persons challenge commonly held assertions of what it means to live a good life.

The ableist conflation that undergirds much of Western philosophy generally follows these four steps:

1. Disability necessarily involves a lack or deprivation of a natural good.
2. Deprivation of a natural good is a harm.
3. Harm causes or is itself a form of pain and suffering.
4. Given 1-3, disabilty comes along with or directly causes pain and suffering.

Dr. Reynolds walks through this while also providing phenomenologies of pain and ability.

OP did respond to the quote.

> let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of val­ues and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life.

Last I checked ants are living entities.

Your quote is about living entities, not just humans. Ants and anything else that makes up a hive is a living entity.

Did you consider the diagnosis “well-to-do white dude” to be rigorous thinking? Just looks like racism to me. It’s also a bit odd that you’d project that upvotes is the end he seeks in a philosophy sub. That “ain’t” rigorous thinking either. You should do some introspective analysis sometime there Pascal.

Why all the comments just angry at Ayn Rand? Is signaling how angry you are at someone accepted as a refutation of their arguments, and the arguments of anyone else who is somehow loosely associated with something named after them?

Bringing up Hume dismissively doesn't work either. Science can obviously study some facts about ethics, for example what people say about ethics under what situations, or what oughts children usually learn and when, even if it can't directly tell anyone what they ought to do. And once someone has some oughts, new ises can get you to make different decisions, and science can give you plenty of those. If you were omniscient, surely that would help you make morally better decisions, if you wanted.

Finally, if you want to understand morality, you should have some knowledge of the variety of naturally occuring morality, and ideally explanations of why it came to be that way. It's easy to make untrue generalizations that exclude behaviors (or patterns of behavior) that aren't merely hypothetical but already exist somewhere.

Think of the Lévy hierarchy in set theory, or higher-order logic more generally. Arithmetic and proof structures recursed over a first-order base can have surprisingly new characteristics, like you can prove different things in different ways as you go up, e.g. the well-ordering lemma can be used to derive the axiom of choice but not vice versa. Or in one family of intuitionistic logic the choice axiom allows deriving the law of excluded middle.

Subtly different structural inputs with substantially different outputs of content.

"At this stage, yes, anything that is true can go in the argument"

No no, eh yes, but your argument also works with other than True stuff, and that's the Problem, more at the bottom.

"Agreed as well. As I explain in the next video, the modern-day definition is actually "search for truth that is not empirically verifiable" (otherwise it is part of science)."

Science is the most reliable way to knowledge, they don't produce objective truths in your sense. everything is Subject to change, if necessary. There is a part of the world, where empirical data represents it the best (e.g. Illness etc., Better not believe them Tom cuises ;) ) and there is a part of the world we can't extrapolate Data - e.g. Morality, because this is a emergent phenomenon. (Nothing special about that, picture a piano: there are no chords on it, still we talk about them. You will never find a chord on your Piano, only the keys, and our taste dictates what keys sound good. The problem is, that the Premises have to be verifiable, and any Argument not trying to prove the premises is a bad one. Your conclusion has absolutely no weight if you cant prove the premises. ( So like the best sounding chord, i cannot imagine a superior religion.)

"The statement "there is no objective truth" is a self-contradiction, because then this very statement cannot be objectively true ;)"

No it is not, you just made a linguistic game out of it. There is a possibility that there are no Truths. I just wrote objectively to make clear that i don't mean Stuff like "I like sandwiches". My comment is not a positive claim, its leaving a possibility open and you just shiftet the burden of proof in a linguistic manner so to say. Your thinking comes from Perikles old ontological view, but there is no proof that ontologically speaking we live in a "completed" world. Also proving stuff only in Language is not the way to go, you need to connect it to the "World."

(If you want to know more about this, read "The promise of artificial intelligence" by B.C. Smith, (existential argument against general AI for now). cool book*.)*

So, here we go, back to the Top:

The argument also works with logically impossible stuff.

-2. "If a squared Ball is True" (for example)

(--> philosophy might not find it.)

So if Christianity would not be true, Philosophy might not find it, and that's what they have (not) done for the last thousand years.

How can u access that Christianity has higher chances than Islam, Bhuddism, or the logically impossible Squared Ball? That's the real question, if you can answer that get ready for a Big Award from Humanity because Ppls trying what your doing for 2000 years now and they continuously failed to do so. I'm not trying to mock you btw.

For your future argument:

"I will argue why Christianity is more reasonable than the other religions."

Sounds to me like saying Santana is better than Gary Moore, and i will show you why. Great, but if you want to prove something else than your taste, you really need to watch out and make sure your premises are checked, and connected to the world. I will take a bow if you show me otherwise, good luck sir.

No, of course not. I am saying that everyone should learn how to deal with their problems. That Is not laziness of course, that's lack of help. Laziness happens when, for example, you have eye problems and trouble reading, but that doesn't mean that you can quit school. Instead, try to solve your problem or find alternative paths.

The Pareto calculation is present in any normative ethical theory for example.

It can and it should. It can count all the resources and possibilities and define what is feasible.

That's a good point. I think loyalty and self-sacrifice can arise in cooperative morality (and other kinds) because I have respect and gratitude for the value that partners bring to me in helping me to thrive and survive.