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Ted talk spins morality on it's head

Started by P3nT4gR4m, May 02, 2014, 06:28:45 AM

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P3nT4gR4m

Science can answer moral questions

It's from 2010 but it's the first time I've personally heard this idea.

Seem to make a lot of sense? Check.

Complete opposite of "conventional wisdom"? Check

Worth exploring? I reckon so.

Rebuttals on a postcard...

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
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walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Junkenstein

Hmm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris_(author)#Criticism

One name stands out in that section:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Atran
Cain may also be familiar with this chap, but as far as I'm aware he does pretty solid work. There's just something about this Harris chap that's setting off alarm bells. I'll have to dig into him more.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

P3nT4gR4m

He certainly seems to have a religious bug in his ass. Islam in particular. To an extent I can relate. I struggle with trying to think of religion for any period of time without the words "fucking retarded, just gas the lot of them" appearing in my train of thought (FTR: this is a personal issue I have, that I'm fully aware of - not a position I'm trying to defend) but there does seem, to me at least, be the seed of an idea here that risks being thrown out with the bathwater if we dismiss him on the grounds of his political opinions.

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Junkenstein

I'd quite agree, I get get an instinctive whiff of "paid for opinion" from this guy and I can't figure out why. Yet.

Thoughts on the actual video shortly.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

P3nT4gR4m

He comes across, to me, as a bit of a dick. Definitely drinking the "axis of evil" koolaid. So for clarification purposes - this is the point I fund interesting

QuoteFor those unfamiliar with my book, here is my argument in brief: Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds -- and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/a-response-to-critics_b_815742.html

All the rest is of little or no interest to me. Imagine I wanted to talk about the MPG fuel efficiency of a VW - how much of a dick Hitler was has no real real bearing on this.

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

LMNO

QuoteConscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end).

Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science.

I can't put my finger on it, but there seems to be some sort of leap taking place between these two sentences.  Something something Laws of Nature describe the movement of incredibly small fields of energy something something random probability something decoherence something something perceived reality something aneristic illusion.

P3nT4gR4m

Yeah, totally. He kind of covers this, without attempting to answer the question by examining extreme ends of the spectrum.

Quote from: Thomas Nagels critiqueEven if this is an exaggeration, Harris has identified a real problem, rooted in the idea that facts are objective and values are subjective. Harris rejects this facile opposition in the only way it can be rejected -- by pointing to evaluative truths so obvious that they need no defense. For example, a world in which everyone was maximally miserable would be worse than a world in which everyone was happy, and it would be wrong to try to move us toward the first world and away from the second. This is not true by definition, but it is obvious, just as it is obvious that elephants are larger than mice. If someone denied the truth of either of those propositions, we would have no reason to take him seriously...

Like yourself, I'm not totally convinced here but I am prepared to play devils advocate for the purposes of exploring this idea

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

rong

"a real smart feller, he felt smart"

LMNO

LessWrong Has an entire Sequence on Metaethics.  There's a lot of stuff there, but I have a feeling it may have a better answer than "Because Science!"

Reginald Ret

Theory of mind comes into play here.
Any scientific study of ethics needs to start there.
Lord Byron: "Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves."

Nigel saying the wisest words ever uttered: "It's just a suffix."

"The worst forum ever" "The most mediocre forum on the internet" "The dumbest forum on the internet" "The most retarded forum on the internet" "The lamest forum on the internet" "The coolest forum on the internet"

Junkenstein

Right, watched it again.

There's a lot that can be agreed with and it's not particularly challenging stuff in the most part. Utilitarianism. Wheeee. Never seems to go near the extreme end of this though which is a shame. Monty Python had some excellent ideas about how a totally utilitarian society would play out.

What's concerning me here more, is the sudden and extreme examples given with Islam. There's a couple of very jarring, very sweeping statements quickly followed with a joke to move it along. There's something about that and it seems to be some kind of trend with "famous" atheists in general. If i recall correctly, Dawkins had a bit of thing about Muslims more than once. This however, is a totally different thread altogether and I doubt anyone's interested.

Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

P3nT4gR4m

Yeah I hear ya - the islam stuff is obviously buying into that post 911 propaganda assault that the christian right started pushing with a vengence. Islam is no worse than christianity in terms of encouraging extremism, both instruction manuals have sections on how to treat your fellow man despicably, kill 'em, rape 'em, drive stakes through their nutsacks and all the rest so singling out one in particular as being worse than the other is fucking tunnel vision but there's something there, under the - one form of idiocy is a lot worse than the other - rhetoric...

as I said before - don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just cos he derailed his own talk with pet rant, doesn't negate the part that made a lot of fucking sense, does it?

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Junkenstein on May 02, 2014, 08:52:57 PM
Right, watched it again.

There's a lot that can be agreed with and it's not particularly challenging stuff in the most part. Utilitarianism. Wheeee. Never seems to go near the extreme end of this though which is a shame. Monty Python had some excellent ideas about how a totally utilitarian society would play out.

What's concerning me here more, is the sudden and extreme examples given with Islam. There's a couple of very jarring, very sweeping statements quickly followed with a joke to move it along. There's something about that and it seems to be some kind of trend with "famous" atheists in general. If i recall correctly, Dawkins had a bit of thing about Muslims more than once. This however, is a totally different thread altogether and I doubt anyone's interested.

Harris is a bird of a feather with Dawkins and Hitchens, and is rather famous for two things in addition to his books on atheism: One, making bold statements about morality being hardwired into us without providing anything approaching scientific justification of this hypothesis, and two, his infamous statement about how if he could wave a magic wand and eliminate rape or religion, he would choose religion in a heartbeat.

"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Ben Shapiro

Quote from: All-Father Nigel on May 03, 2014, 12:04:12 AM
Quote from: Junkenstein on May 02, 2014, 08:52:57 PM
Right, watched it again.

There's a lot that can be agreed with and it's not particularly challenging stuff in the most part. Utilitarianism. Wheeee. Never seems to go near the extreme end of this though which is a shame. Monty Python had some excellent ideas about how a totally utilitarian society would play out.

What's concerning me here more, is the sudden and extreme examples given with Islam. There's a couple of very jarring, very sweeping statements quickly followed with a joke to move it along. There's something about that and it seems to be some kind of trend with "famous" atheists in general. If i recall correctly, Dawkins had a bit of thing about Muslims more than once. This however, is a totally different thread altogether and I doubt anyone's interested.

Harris is a bird of a feather with Dawkins and Hitchens, and is rather famous for two things in addition to his books on atheism: One, making bold statements about morality being hardwired into us without providing anything approaching scientific justification of this hypothesis, and two, his infamous statement about how if he could wave a magic wand and eliminate rape or religion, he would choose religion in a heartbeat.



Rape, or Religion? He chooses Religion? This assbag made my top 10 asshats I need to run over with a car.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: All father, Bearman on May 03, 2014, 01:13:01 AM
Quote from: All-Father Nigel on May 03, 2014, 12:04:12 AM
Quote from: Junkenstein on May 02, 2014, 08:52:57 PM
Right, watched it again.

There's a lot that can be agreed with and it's not particularly challenging stuff in the most part. Utilitarianism. Wheeee. Never seems to go near the extreme end of this though which is a shame. Monty Python had some excellent ideas about how a totally utilitarian society would play out.

What's concerning me here more, is the sudden and extreme examples given with Islam. There's a couple of very jarring, very sweeping statements quickly followed with a joke to move it along. There's something about that and it seems to be some kind of trend with "famous" atheists in general. If i recall correctly, Dawkins had a bit of thing about Muslims more than once. This however, is a totally different thread altogether and I doubt anyone's interested.

Harris is a bird of a feather with Dawkins and Hitchens, and is rather famous for two things in addition to his books on atheism: One, making bold statements about morality being hardwired into us without providing anything approaching scientific justification of this hypothesis, and two, his infamous statement about how if he could wave a magic wand and eliminate rape or religion, he would choose religion in a heartbeat.



Rape, or Religion? He chooses Religion? This assbag made my top 10 asshats I need to run over with a car.

Yeah, he's a bit of a joke. Probably had a few good thoughts at one point in time, and then rode that out to a premature but inevitable obsolescence in Old White Sexist Racist Man Land.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."