Although pointing out tautologies can clear up confusion.

What do you mean by good or bad?

>There are lots of different types of observations that dark matter explains.

Sure, and the entire purpose of MOND is to account for these observations without having to invoke dark matter. So being forced to accept "MOND + dark matter" would completely defeat the purpose of proposing MOND in the first place.

A tautology is not an argument. It does not have a conclusion.

It seems like the conclusion is smuggled in because in a way it's tautological. What we mean by good or bad has to be conveyed by conscious valence, as that's the only way we can know anything.

Then if you reject closed individualism, you have to admit that other people's experiences matter as well.

Hence you get valence utilitarianism.

> Mate, you didn't argue your position; you stated a claim and then folded your arms.

I guess we have that in common....two differences between us though:

• I am willing to defend my claim, whereas we've seen what your defense of yours consists of: "Hahahahahahahahahahshahaha".

• you seem unable to answer simple questions

EDIT: followed up by blocking me, the sign of a true intellectual powerhouse.

MOND so far has been unable to explain all the phenomena dark matter does. I think most scientists see it as a failed effort.

What do you mean "nowhere to be found". We have found dark matter. We know where it is because it's gravitationally lensing photons. We also know where it's not see the bullet cluster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster

We have found it but not by direct observation because it does not emit light but it does interact via gravity. We know it's out there, we just don't know exactly what it is yet.

Mate, you didn't argue your position; you stated a claim and then folded your arms. That's why I laughed. Not even worth the time. I'll keep an eye here out of an abundance of generosity, but I'm blocking you if your response is anything except a cogent and complete argument.

No. We stop trying to make the data fit the theory and instead start asking why the data doesn't fit the theory. And what always has to be an option is, change the theory.

I'm more than happy to grant that people use an intuitive form of utilitarian judgment as a heuristic aid in decision-making. That's quite far from claiming, as the original article does, that utilitarianism can form an "ultimate ethical theory," or that conscious valence solves the "is/ought" problem in moral reasoning.

The fact is, the vast majority of the decisions that people make in their day-to-day lives don't really involve any reasoning at all, ethical or otherwise.

As an ethical theory, utilitarianism is, at best, a limited lens through which we can examine certain very simplified, highly circumscribed decisions, for points at which we have (or think we have) a far clearer understanding of the most likely consequences of an action than we do in normal circumstances.

This is why, I think, utilitarians seem to like thought experiments so much: it's much easier to formulate a utilitarian reasoning chain to decide dramatic imaginary scenarios than it is to apply it to normal daily behavioral decisions. Utilitarianism might be able to figure out whether it would be ethical to choose to annihilate the human race in nuclear fire, but it has a lot less to say about whether I should tell my kid to stop picking his nose.

There are lots of different types of observations that dark matter explains.

Even if MOND perfectly explained the rotational speed in galaxies it couldn’t explain the other observations. So you still need dark matter.

> The most serious problem facing Milgrom's law is that it cannot eliminate the need for dark matter in all astrophysical systems: galaxy clusters show a residual mass discrepancy even when analyzed using MOND

The fact that some form of unseen mass must exist in these systems detracts from the adequacy of MOND as a solution to the missing mass problem, although the amount of extra mass required is a fifth that of a Newtonian analysis, and there is no requirement that the missing mass be non-baryonic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics

I'm not saying it necessarily has to be happiness, any positive experience counts

This is a good response, but I don’t think it quite works. You’re still requiring that the experience of happiness is the only morally significant component of humanness, which doesn’t seem true.

I don’t see how utilitarianism necessarily follows from that.

That conclusion absolutely does not follow from those premises, and the article makes no coherent argument that it does. It smuggles its conclusion into the premises themselves, and asserts it with no argument.

Valenced means it can be intrinsically good or bad, suffering is intrinsically bad, joy is intrinsically good.

Closed individualism (nice description from https://qri.org/glossary ): "In its most basic form, this is the common-sense personal identity view that you start existing when you are born and stop existing when you die. According to this view each person is a different subject of experience with an independent existence. One can believe in a soul ontology and be a Closed Individualist at the same time, with the correction that you exist as long as your soul exists, which could be the case even before or after death."

I don't think "people themselves" really full exist as independent entities outside of a web of experience. Then the value in someone's individuality comes from the experiences associated with that individuality.

This is the point about rejecting closed individualism

> As long as you are able to rank any two experiences relative to each other, the rest is sorted out by transitivity.

This is key, I actually recall hearing about some Neuroscience research that showed that we actually do these kind of comparisons all the time and are quite good at distinguishing the relative valence of very mixed experiences

I actually think if you pay more close attention (e.g. by training in meditation) you will see that there are no really neutral experiences, but there is also some kind of pleasantness in just existing without suffering.

It is true that the picture can be mixed though and it's not obvious how to treat that: see here for example https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bvtAXefTDQgHxc9BR/just-look-at-the-thing-how-the-science-of-consciousness

What do you mean by consciousness being valenced, and what do you mean by closed individualism?

Utilitarianism is the only option if you believe in the reality of consciousness, that it is valenced and reject closed individualism

If you can believe suffering is objectively bad and that other people can suffer, then you get the should. It's almost tautological based on the definition of bad

OK great. I'm not sure what your actual point was then? Do we just abandon physics because we can't develop GUTs which explain everything?

> But that still doesn't tell me why I should want to end suffering for others.

Arguably it may decrease the likelihood of people harming other people due to anger as a consequence of their suffering...and some day, one of those harmed people could be you or one of your loved ones.

Try here