Well firstly it means voting has to be easy.
We’d never get voter id laws/similar designed to suppress certain segments of the populaces access to voting. The government can be sued by an individual/group that felt it was more difficult for them to vote, so they make damn sure that doesn’t happen. Poling places are plentiful. Even in the most remote parts of the desert they’ll send out vans to set up mobile polling places. If you’re working on Election Day your employer is required to give you an extra paid break just for voting. They send election commission staff into hospitals, etc.
everyone gets heard.

Consequently we get far far fewer of the fringe extremists in our politics than we see in the international news. Hard focussing on a radically obsessed fringe won’t get you into office (well, it might get a group 1 senate seat, but not HoRs seats).
Mobs chanting to hang the vice pres would never happen here - the kind of aggressive and divisive politics needed to start that nonsense doesn’t work when everyone has to vote.
the politicians have to play it safe.
Their base alone is not enough, they need to appeal to outsiders too.

As someone who sympathizes with Hume I found this article to be in line with many of my own thoughts, but I do not think Aristotle can be taken as reducing ethics to simplistic logic. For example, eudaimonia implies experience, without which, we speak of nothing. That said it seems certainly possible to take an Aristotlean route and end up on the wrong foot.

So what if morality exists to us because we are at some level, and perhaps not at one which is purely intellectual, moral beings? What if morality is necessarily meaningless to us apart from this aspect of ourselves, be it culturally instilled, psychological, biological and/or interpreted as spiritual? If it is, we have no expectation of it, whatever it is, to conform to simplified ideas able to be grasped by limited minds. Why should we expect it to be uniform like a simplistic fact as opposed to something more akin to a multi-faceted landscape? Well, for one, that would be inconvenient for attempts to replace what is, with something else more suitable to other interests, as each and every attempt would almost certainly result in consequences violating what was originally there.

That said, as for honor killings, I think the author can trust his moral instinct in the wrongness of the act, but I would go further, suspecting that there may be a real basis for the honor killing itself. It's not impossible that the perpetrator has experienced a wrong. That may not justify the retribution, however, as much as it reveals that the culture within which these social and phsycological realities persist is itself contradictory, and morally twisted.

We already hit the pinnacle of war philosophy in M.A.S.H.

Is it even worthwhile to discuss or study "war crimes"?

Say we make some big advancement in our ethics around war. So what? I don't see how it would save any lives. You think that you're going to show Putin proof of some wrongdoing and he's going to act differently?

I'd like to hear someone describe a way in which philosophical study of the morality of war is going to improve society.

Do dogs have moral intuitions? I'd say yes based on how they respond to failing to reward tricks, giving more treats to dog2, dogs' capacity for self sacrifice, etc.

Do chimps/bonobos have moral intuitions? In addition to the example provided in the podcast, the two primates have very different strategies for conflict resolution despite their genetic proximity, and I have a hard time identifying the point in human evolution that triggered some sort of deontological obligation.

Should we punish lions for eating cubs sired by other lions? Although they are warm-blooded like us, this is normal behavior for the lion. We might say lions don't have the capacity for morality, but that requires distinguishing them from primates, whales, dolphins, rats, etc.

But lets put aside the premise that humans are categorically distinct as moral angents. If we discovered an alien species (perhaps descended from ravens or parrots rather than chimps), could we reasonably judge them by our own standards? What if the conditions were so much harsher than earth that morally appalling behavior was necessarily required for that species to survive? (Relatedly, do we judge other humans who bend/break moral norms in the name of survival, as many survivors of genocide or war have done?).

IMO, moral codes are path dependent, adaptive, and emergent. We see this biologically with the examples provided in the podcast, but also in human history and political philosophy.

We can even take this principle one further into the realm of political philosophy. Suppose a sovereign has a (deontologicsl) moral code that prohibits taking violent action against a rebellious faction that is ready and willing to commit violence. Should the sovereign adhere to their code even where the rebels will impose a moral order that would be horrifying to the sovereign? I don't find this example much different than an animal with poor self-preservation instincts, but some of my comments below go into more details about my premises and corrolary arguments etc.

"Most of the people who will ever live haven't been born yet. Our present population may be a rounding error compared to the number of people in future generations."

That's a bold assumption

Why would it be impossible? It resides in itself, the same as any view. All the information of the universe must be unified on some level (to interact and have causal influence on the rest). A god's eye view would be this unified whole (all information). I assume you're thinking, there is a universe, and then God is something "looking at it" and must then represent that information in a separate mind, but really, the universe *is* the mind of God, they're not separate.

It seems that you’re not willing to answer, and claim that’s the case because of a word I used, which is disappointing. I don’t believe math exists in nature, though I also don’t think such existence determines whether numbers are real.

I’d be interested to understand your point of view there, but I don’t really care to ”argue” about it. I’d just like an explanation. I’ll defer to you as being far more knowledgeable than I am on this topic.

What I really care about is why you find this to be the most intriguing question ever. I don’t find it particularly interesting at all, and I’d like to understand why you do, even if it’s a one sentence response.

I'm not a biologist so you make a good point, I can't give specific examples of how Smith's ideas are falsifiable. However, I do know that when I read other books by anthropologists who analyze Late Pleistocene human behavior (e.g., Christopher Boehm) or books on game theory and animal/human behavior they always cite Smith's work and I've read other things on information in biology that cites Smith's paper. In both cases that's why I read them because I kept seeing them cited so often.

As for philosophy and pseudoscience. I guess I am harsh because I see much (not all) of modern philosophy as pseudoscience. I have a thread in another group meant for longer discussions (I think it is /askphilosophy) where I raised this issue and tried to explain my ideas but I gave up because it seemed no one was really understanding what I was trying to say. Either because what I said wasn't clear or because it challenges some of the assumptions that many modern philosophers take for granted and don't want to give up. I would like to think it's the latter but of course I would think that.

Gould is someone I don't have much respect for. The thing that he's most well known for (Punctuated Equilibrium) is a kind of theory that I call "either trivial or wrong". I.e., the way Gould describes exactly what he means by Punctuated Equilibrium isn't very clear. If you interpret it one way (that mutations happen more often during certain times in history, i.e., those where there is massive climate change or other changes to the environment) then it is obviously true but trivial. Everyone already knew that when Gould published his work. If you take the more extreme interpretation, that adaptations ONLY occur during such periods then it is a new theory but is clearly wrong. I think many people don't realize this because the way Gould writes isn't very clear so he can provide evidence that supports the trivial version of his theory and pretend that it supports the more extreme version.

Another reason I don't care much for Gould is that I think he behaved in a very unprofessional manner in his criticism of E.O. Wilson and Sociobiology. He equated Sociobiology with all sorts of ideologies that is has nothing to do with. It got to the point where Wilson (who politically is far to the left) couldn't give presentations on college campuses without being disrupted by people calling him a fascist and much of that was based on Gould's unfair and incorrect criticism of Wilson's work. For more detail on this I recommend reading the first chapter in Cosmides and Tooby's excellent book on Evolutionary Psychology: The Adapted Mind. There is a PDF of that chapter here: The Psychological Foundations of Culture. It's worth reading for other reasons as well, it is an excellent introduction and overview to the relatively new field of Evolutionary Psychology (which IMO is mostly Sociobiology rebranded with a more acceptable name).

BTW, I'm not a fan of Wilson's latest work on Group Selection but I still think he was brilliant and a pioneer and was treated very unfairly by Gould. That was a complete tangent because you mentioned Gould, I'll reply to your main point in another comment.

A few thoughts and clarifications

I do not believe that morality exists independent of sentient existence, or what might be called consciousness. For example, I do not think anything of moral significance occurs on Mars or Pluto or the Sun. If the world were to be obliterated in a nuclear holocaust, there would be nothing left to assess the morality of that action, nor any future actions. Without God, or some other type of observer, the universe is indifferent as to our existence, and the notion of morality would retrospectively focus on a tiny sliver of time that wouldn't be relevant for the remainder of existence.

But sticking with the nuclear example, suppose someone took control over the nuclear arsenal of the United States and threatened to launch the missiles unless you tortured them (think of Joker trying to get Batman to break his rules). One might say torture is inherently wrong, but here it would be necessary to maintain a world of any moral significance. To choose not to torture would be the height of hubris to me because it puts maintaining an individual moral code on a pedestal at the expense of countless others, most of which will have different values but none of which will exist if the deontologist maintains their chastity. I choose this example because I think that stakes change when we're talking about the continued existence of life itself, which I view as one of the foundations of morality at its most basic level.

I do not think humans are the only animals capable of moral reasoning. Rats save rats they know, but not strangers. Dogs react if you give one more treats than the other. Primates adopt orphans that were sired by others, etc. The podcast lists some of these examples, but there are many more (e.g., dolphins protecting humans).

Perhaps you distinguish those examples from morality and view them as instinct, but don't humans have instincts as well? We see it all the time, sometimes in things as simple as reflexively turning our head when we see an attractive prospective mate, or in body language. I think philosophy has a huge blind spot about putting humans on pedestals compared to other life forms.

You might also distinguish modern humans from our ancestors, but do you believe that early humans were not conscious? Is there a discrete moment in time where human evolution progressed sufficiently to trigger moral duties that did not exist moments before? Would that moral code apply to sentient aliens who evolved from different species in radically different biomes? Putting these notions together, morality is path dependent based on adaptive behaviors/intuitions that are species-specific. Although a chimp or gorilla is capable of communicating with humans and otherwise emulating some human behaviors, it would be a mistake to hold them to the same standard as a human who is capable of those same functions simply because chimps are wired differently.

I resolve these issues by placing perpetuating the species as the prime directive of morality, and taking humans off of a pedestal. Humans have a care-intensive, cooperative survival strategy because that's what we're wired for, and as we got more sophisticated we attempted to refine those intuitions into religious/cultural/philosophical beliefs about morality. We see this with practices like cannabilism and polygamy, as well as science-fiction shows (e.g., Star Trek with Klingons, Vulcan, Ferengi, etc., all sentient but each having vastly different moral sensibilities).

Some of those beliefs were not adaptive, such as Christian sects that thought reproduction was a sin. Some of these moral codes work better than others, but if they're not responsive to the circumstances that surround them, it doesn't really matter if they were "correct" from a deontological standpoint, at least in my opinion.

Thanks for your time as well.

There are plenty of reptiles and even insects that engage in nurturing of young, though admittedly it isn't common. The problem is that no, the "logic" isn't nuanced at all, since it doesn't start out explaining why crocodiles don't appear to act morally apart from their parenting but we do, or why lions kill the young of rivals but we don't. Morality didn't "emerge" any more than it "evolved". It just is, like physics itself, and like physics it requires a conscious mind to notice it, but it is there whether it gets noticed or not. A crocodile does not act morally nor a lion act immorally because they do not (despite much confusion on this matter) experience consciousness, they do not make decisions using self-determination, and they are not moral agents. (These three are all identical things, btw.) Only moral agents can act morally or immorally; non-conscious creatures simply exist, without moral repercussions.

I was surprised the references in the original article didn't mention Richard Dawkins. The "logic" of 'endothermic morality' presented is pretty much the same in effect (and affect) as the hypothesis of adaptive altruism he developed in The Selfish Gene back in the 1970s.

>our neurobiology allows us (does not necessitate us) to feel deep care for others.

Actually, I think you have it backwards (whether in terms of fact or the theory being presented): our neurobiology necessitates that we feel deep care for others (because we must nurture our young), and this 'allows but does not require us' to apply (or 'misapply', in evolutionary terms) this compassion to a broader target than our offspring.

Any biological explanation for morality is a blind alley and a dead end, since morality is not a biological imperative, it is a conscious observation. Even someone who believes firmly that they know what their own personal morality demands they do is free to act immorally. Or vice versa; a conscious creature is capable of recognizing what is moral even when it doesn't describe their personal actions. It seem self-evident to me that this is the very nature of morality, as it is the nature of consciousness as well: not to determine what we do, but to determine why we might want to do otherwise.

Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.

Thanks for the tip about the Shannon paper by J M Smith. His Theory of Evolution was already in my reading list. I have to say that I am a bit sceptical if most of his ideas are actually falsifiable in a testable way, but maybe you know better. Evolutionary theorist tend sometimes to make big statements that actually can't be proven, especially when discussing social and moral evolution of humans (think about the criticism by Gould etc.).

I think pseudoscience about Latour is a bit harsh, you can also call it philosophy (this is a philosophy sub). In general, I share your sentiment that science itself is much more interesting than sociology of science. I also think that Latour would be first to admit this.

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It's funny because I literally came to this tab from a similar read: https://old.reddit.com/r/Guattari/comments/y0ywmw/to_code_or_not_to_code/. It's also funny in the Kafka-sense of the word, used ironically to mean terror.

> Consider a staunch religious believer - scorn, ridicule, dismissal actually strengthens the person's conviction. The believer will usually feign esoteric understanding, a higher purpose, & even display sorrow for the unbeliever.

Now consider how similarly this behavior manifests in those who hold different ideological beliefs, such as Scientific Materialists - then consider that these people typically have much better education, and yet so often fall victim to the same cognitive errors.

If you ask me, this is something that science could extract a lot of valuable knowledge from....but alas, the human mind appears to dynamically downgrade curiosity when it dares to examine itself.

> The whole situation resembles a Christian contending that unless one has read the whole bible, nay further, has memorized chapter & verse of the bible, then one cannot make a valid argument against Christianity.

Once again, a similarity exists: if one observes internet arguments about "science", it is quite common for pro-science people to assert that those who dare criticize science necessarily do not understand what they are talking about.

Human beings are fascinating creatures.

Too be fair we literally couldn’t exist without each other, and yet are repelled by each other.

Gaia may be an interesting idea to make people think about how connected everything is on the planet but it is at best poetry or a literary device not a theory. The Earth isn't a living organism and it doesn't evolve in the sense that organisms evolve with natural selection. For that to be true the Earth would have to be competing with other living planets for resources, it would need to generate other planet organisms, there would need to be random mutations in the planets generated by the Earth that would be selected for, etc. None of this is my idea it is all in an essay Richard Dawkins wrote a long time ago debunking the Gaia hypothesis.

I realize what I discussed above is the version of the Gaia Hypothesis that the author of the article rejects but I wanted to get that out of the way first and then address the actual article. My problem is that if that isn't what the Gaia hypothesis is, it isn't clear what it actually is. I read the article and it seems that he's claiming it's a new way of thinking about life and that distinctions such as cell are artificial because the cells (at least in an animal body) are all dependent on each other. Which is all true (more or less) but it is hardly new. There are all sorts of theories that look at the organism not at the individual cells that make up its body but in terms of higher level organs comprised of millions of cells working together. The brain is probably the most interesting example. Neurologists don't just study individual neurons but layers and columns in the brain that do things like edge detection (in the visual cortex).

I say more or less because you can take individual cells from a body and keep them alive outside the body. So it can make sense to talk about an individual cell in the body or even to go smaller and talk about the mRNA in a cell and how it helps make copies of that cell. I found nothing of any scientific value in the article. I agree with the sentiment but I disagree with calling something that is a literary device a theory. If it's a theory it makes falsifiable predictions better than other theories of standard biology and I couldn't find any such predictions.

Actual biology is beautiful and mind blowing. The fact that in every cell you have a complete blueprint for the entire organism (the DNA in each cell) is incredible and also there are amazing parallels between information in computer science and in biology. John Maynard Smith wrote a fascinating paper on that where he talks about how Shannon's model of information (measured using the same formula as entropy, indeed information is a kind of anti-entropy, information is order and entropy is disorder). This stuff is just as poetic as the pseudoscience in this article and it actually is real not some poetic musings.

Addendum: the idea of looking at an ecosystem rather than just an individual organism is also not new. Again, there is actual science on this and again I recommend John Maynard Smith as a good place to start. Smith wrote a wonderful little book called Evolution and the Theory of Games. He shows that evolution isn't just about competition as is often incorrectly assumed. He uses mathematical game theory to model various types of both competition and collaboration. For example, Smith's game theory models explain (in a falsifiable testable way) why conspecifics who compete (e.g., for mates) seldom fight to the death or even to the point where they injure each other. Again, I find real science more beautiful and poetic than pseudoscience.

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But whether it is a fact that he cannot do it anymore is another matter! :)

>what do you think is so special about humans?

The ability to argue such things, the interest in doing so, and the capacity to benefit from the activity. (These are all the same thing, BTW.)

>And how do you take into account the gulf between a human with severe cognitive deficit vs Albert Einstein level of cognition?

What account needs to be taken? Are you suggesting that we should consider people who aren't smart to be less human? I dispute that there is anything such thing as a "level of cognition", merely an apparent difference in the results of cognition based on the circumstances. You can either accept that all humans are conscious because they are humans and consciousness is endemic (not guaranteed but probable) in humans, or you can insist that some humans are less human because of what you describe as a "cognitive deficit" of some arbitrary "level" of severity. I take the simpler approach, and stick with considering consciousness as either a categorical property, or an instance of behavior, as appropriate for the context, without falsely assuming all contexts must be considered identical in this regard. For example, it isn't really as confusing as you might believe to say that a sleeping ("unconscious") Einstein is not smarter than a developmentally delayed child who is awake, yet both are equally conscious creatures and fully human.

>What bare minimum do humans have that other animals lack?

The scientific phrase would be "neural correlates of consciousness". The philosophical term would be "mind". AKA "reasoning".

Deal with it. 😉

Unfortunately, you've ruined any hope I have for such a conversation simply by using the word "concept". As I am already discussing in a different thread, using that term assumes a conclusion, and untangling the premise would be necessary for an adequate consideration of the original question. You seem to have covered both sides of the argument, by suggesting that math both does and does not "exist in the physical universe". How could anyone possibly argue against such a position?

Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.

What makes you think they are disentangled? What do you even mean by "disentangled"?

Let me try to address what might be the premise of your question, based on some presumptions about why you would ask it. I believe you may be wondering how humans can be observing rather than creating 'morality' as a real feature of the world if morality has no effect on any part of the world besides humans. I would answer, if that is indeed what you meant, that the situation is no different than any other aspect of the world.

Gravity and aerodynamics did not evolve, they are intrinsic physical principles. Birds did not need to consciously observe gravity or aerodynamics to evolve the ability to fly, nor did they decide whether or not to do so. Unlike birds (please ignore the controversial nature of this premise, just take it for granted for the purposes of this explanation, or substitute insects instead if it bothers you too much) humans possess consciousness. This allows us to observe birds, gravity, and aerodynamics and build airplanes which enable us to fly. Standard philosophy (ie normative ethics) expects morality to be like airplanes, consciously constructed based on logical principles. When that approach fails, because morality is an aspect of existence rather than a technological development, many people (both philosophers and laymen) assume morality must be like birds or else it can't exist, and ethics becomes either nothing more than cultural norms or personal preference (or a contrived combination of both: imaginary airplanes.) But morality is not airplanes (real or imagined) neither is it birds; it is aerodynamics. We can (both as individuals and as societies) accept it is real or deny it is physical, and we can use it to rise above the ground and conquer gravity by flying, acting morally, or instead ignore it and act dishonestly and selfishly. But it is real, it is something we observe rather than create, even though, like the principles of aerodynamics, we can reconstruct the principles by carefully considering the causes and results in the world.

I hope that makes sense. Thanks for your time.

The design of democracy itself is a hidden item in the third rail of politics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_rail_(politics)

Notice how it doesn't even make the list on Wikipedia.

Notice (ha!) how rarely it gets mentioned in social media conversations.

>I was hoping to show you how implausible it would be for a curious amateur to understand physics better than the experts.

This discussion has never been about understanding physics, it is about understanding philosophy. I understand physics just fine, despite your uncertainty on that point.

>So you should probably stop saying that physicists are wrong about the weirdness

So long as they "shut up and calculate", I have nothing to say. When they begin philosophizing about the implications of their calculations, I will address any mistakes I believe they have made. Likewise, I am not a certified expert on philosophy, but when philosophers make errors on scientific matters, it is still possible for me to notice that.

>really QM works just like regular mechanics if only people would listen to you.

Your interpretation of my position is inaccurate. Metaphysical uncertainty in QM works just like metaphysical uncertainty in regular mechanics, despite your contention to the contrary. It is just that QM forces some people, who believe (incorrectly) that metaphysical uncertainty can be ignored, to confront the fact that they are mistaken.

Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.