https://youtu.be/vxhTDIUCPMM

https://youtu.be/vxhTDIUCPMM

https://youtu.be/vxhTDIUCPMM

If man cannot quantify progress its possible man is chasing his tail in ever increasing rapidity such that centrifugal force will cause his entire enterprise to self-destruct.

How can you say life is absurd when we can spend it making money or growing our Instagram account? We have the freedom to vote for the politician of our choice and pick any gender we choose. If this does not give meaning to a persons life, what could?

Belief in a physical reality dependent on causality had only one place it could end up. I guess one could sum up the last 6000 years of human thought by the acronym GIGO.

You get what I was trying to say! Thank you for commenting.

The only cases where I've seen longtermist reasoning used in favor of genocide are when non-longtermists try to reductio longtermism and/or utilitarianism with weird unrealistic hypotheticals. These problems aren't new to utilitarianism, but I don't think it makes much sense to be concerned about them when 1) most longtermists I've read about aren't actually hardcore utilitarians, 2) real-life, non-strawmen longtermists don't advocate for genocide, and 3) real-life hardcore utilitarians that I'm familiar with about spend zero time thinking about genocide and quite a lot of time stressing about whether they should be donating more to charity.

The implications of weird hypothetical thought experiments are only as serious as people take them to be; i.e. not very.

Isn't the assumption that humanity is probably going to get wiped out within the next few thousand years also bold? It's far from impossible, but so is humanity's survival--I'd call being highly confident about either possibility bold.

I enjoy your discussions. This is why I am in this sub.

Not the worst idea. If you consider how much education it takes to be a trained doctor in charge of a few lives, how much harder is it to be making decisions for all the lives in your polity?

"the animals cannot know or care, they simply act in response to stimuli however their genetic programming causes them to, without thought or remorse."

"The real question is whether humans have anything other than instincts. Your ability to ask the question proves you have self-determination."

We are also acting based on our genetic programming and the input from the outside world. Nothing more than AI on a body really, we just don't know our exact code. Our actions are nothing more than the output of a model. Randomness might be involved as well, but that is not free will.

"So you're saying that murdering every human in existence wouldn't be immoral? That seems like an odd, and very immoral, position to take."

It wouldn't be moral or immoral. Assume you are testing out a short trial period of a "game", limited to 3 hours. You could do whatever you want, once the trial runs out, none of your actions matter anymore and you are locked out, game and your save files are erased forever.

Does your actions actually matter? No. Are we really in a different situation than an AI playing this game? The AI is coded to perform certain actions and preserve itself, while its actions can be heavily manipulated depending on input presented by other players. Players are different variations of the same AI.

Lets take up morality. The only basis for morality i can see is by indoctrinating society that it is "bad" to do certain things or harm others, we are reducing the likelihood that someone else will harm us. It can be argued that we are following the self preservation task of our code by creating a "morality".

Lets say however, you have come to the conclusion that even if you harm others, you will still be safe from others inflicting the same harm on you, what incentives are there now to follow morality? There is another incentive. Due to a combination of our code and indoctrination, one might avoid harming others to avoid feeling "bad".

In the end it is not so different than a set of conditional jumps in assembly. Basicly a long set of risk/reward assesments with everyone having a different threshold. Again, since we can't read our brains like a computer code, we don't have the whole formula for a calculation.

It might be impossible for some to arrive at a certain conclusion no matter the inputs presented to them due to their "code", or if it is a critical function or a linear code, it might be executed regardless of which inputs we present in to the calculation.

Each person might come to a different conclusion on a single "moral" question, even if inputs are the same, because their code might be different. Or you could indoctrinate two people on the same/very similar code with different inputs in their development stage and later, they might each come to a different conclusion on the same moral question.

Since we don't know our code, our observation is mostly limited to check which inputs produce different outcomes. There is no objective correct or incorrect outcome.

It is entirely possible that if you could somehow modify Putin's brain like we could modify an AI's code, you could easily make him declare peace or launch nuclear weapons depending on your preference. So where is his free will? How are his actions anything but the output of a complicated model?

Well, i feel like i should point out that i play Rimworld and thus, i consider how many hats could be made

Imagine a trolley and you hold the lever. One path leads to the creation of 11 seasons of M*A*S*H. There other side leads to bad TV.

However, the rail to Hawkeye and Radar has 500,000 Koreans lashed to it.

What do you do?

Didn't that happen in China with the rise of the Confucian emperors. Basically if you act like people deserve to live or are good, they'll behave that way.

This is an amazingly good answer, thank you!

>Who would exact punishment?

Vigilante "justice" of some kind.

> How would America etc even put Putin in jail?

Putin?

>I agree that awareness is good and that is what Geneva convention did. It wrote down what everyone already believed.

I'm thinking more about events in the last few decades. How many innocent dead people are there in the middle East as a consequence of US foreign policy?

>Enforcement seems impossible.

Dare to dream baby!

Well only do many people were citizens of Rome originally to my understanding. Not sure how it was in Greece at the time. I assume he was in Athens.

>Upvoting because it's a good question, but I couldn't disagree more with the premise.

I love this! This is what we ought to be about, right?

What you say makes a lot of sense. I do agree that there is room for studying what we do to criminals and why. We came a long way from what you described to, for example: https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=60 (read some 20 or so pages, perhaps 15 minutes?)

I guess that my concern is more about the practical. What's the point in determining that if Putin should be imprisoned given that we can't do it,

In practice, I do see use in that we might get the definition right and then teach our kids so well that we potentially raise a society that would never wage an unjust war (for whatever definition of unjust you want).

Or I suppose that maybe some 15 year old in Azerbaijan or whatever will in 30 years be the leader of the nation and maybe he'll remember Biden wagging his finger at Putin and learn right from wrong and he'll not wage a war because he learned morals that way.

But I just read and article proclaim that Biden is calling Putin a war criminal like it's some big proclamation that is going to have any effect on this war and I think that is bullshit. The outcome of this war is unaffected by such a proclamation.

In conclusion, studying war so that we can teach our kids morals around war is good. Beyond that, these moral judgements on an active war seem pointless.

As before, please disagree, up vote, and educate me!

My ethics professor wrote his thesis on the theory that Socrates wanted a society in which citizens were the best possible members of society because they were well educated. That would be sweet but I think he also wanted schooling to last all the way to age 30.

Who would exact punishment? How would America etc even put Putin in jail?

I agree that awareness is good and that is what Geneva convention did. It wrote down what everyone already believed.

Enforcement seems impossible.

I don’t feel the need to have an “argument” because I don’t at this point care about this issue. Whether numbers are “real” or not, whatever that means, they’re very useful and fundamental in helping us understand the world and make decisions. You deny the possibility of a simple answer being a valid response at least in part because the discussion is supposedly so complex, a premise I reject, and in fact you deny that it’s even possible for me to have thoughts of value on the issue, so there’s no point in my enabling your fervor and apparent anger at me.

What I was hoping is to understand why you believe this to be the most intriguing question there is. Many questions don’t have answers or ”easy” explanations! so this doesn’t explain to me why you assert that this is objectively the most intriguing question. You may find “exploration of epistemic and metaphysical certainty and uncertainty“ to be fascinating, but I don’t find those topics particularly interesting or relevant. Rather than this being objectively one of the most interesting questions possible, I feel like this is a matter of personal preference. I believe you totally when you say that the discussion is very complex and explores these subjects in amazing depth, but like many other scientists, I don’t find those particular subjects particularly stimulating, and in fact they feel sort of irrelevant to me, especially when the focus is on questions which apparently can’t ever be answered with empirical data or logical proof.

I’m glad that exploration of this question has enriched your life, just as questions like “why do we experience having a sense of self”, a question which is primary in Cognitive Science and appears simple on the surface, have captured the minds of people involved in neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and other fields. Of course that question may have a simple answer, in part because it’s actually solvable, and finding this answer may help us understand numerous things about ourselves and other life. Different people find different questions interesting, including academics and free thinkers in all fields.

Hello. I read your blog article on Camus & Kierkegaard. I enjoyed your examination of the absurd in each of the authors. I agree they are both very important philosophically.

I suggest that many existentialists would celebrate the absurdity of a human fighting for significance in a vast, uncaring world. The achievement is the fight, not winning. The creation of value as thoughts, emotions, & actions may be futile & absurd, but isn't it wonderful that it is done anyway?

A different take on absurdity could be pushed further back then to individual philosophers, or back further than even the whole of philosophy. For many, evolution is a very plausible biological theory (let's not argue about facts & theories now). By what biological mechanism can we have become the savants who can discover & understand the meaning, or lack thereof, of the universe? By what leap?

I consider humanity's flight from nature, civilization, is the place where such questions of life's meaning or absurdity come into play. The universe doesn't care or does care, but we as evolved creatures cannot know this. When our distant forebears in poorly tanned furs chased giant elk, while the other tribe members sat hopeful & starving at camp, humanity was closer to the meaning or absurdity of life than now.

Now we have built ourselves fortresses from which we sally forth to destroy whole species & ecosystems. Most of us don't even notice these actions & even deny they happen. We have isolated ourselves in our ever growing enclave from which we measure, gene splice, make smart phones, celebrate our magnificence, & weigh the value or nonvalue of the universe. Our circumscribed redoubt of reason, science, economies, morality, & meaning are the place considerations of absurdity & meaning belong. Our considerations are localized by our limitations which we have exaggerated with our drive to separate ourselves from the grunting, smelly ancestors we know about, but at the same time, by some sleight of mind, refuse to truly acknowledge as being us.

To return to existentialism, I consider existentialism to be a human endeavor reserved for the educated, well-spoken civilian immersed in human culture. It has value within that orbit. As for the universe, or even the natural world we have walled ourselves from both physically & intellectually, such considerations of absurdity or meaning, don't even exist. We invented such considerations … & that is existentialism at its core.

As said, there is no "right" or "wrong" in moral consensus, only what the majority of a group will agree to uphold and defend.

You are still conflating moral consensus with some kind of objective "rightness" or "wrongness", these things dont exist in reality.

Morality can never be objective, because you cant find them in laws of physics or fabric of reality, its a subjective human concept developed through group consensus, that's it.

The only parts of longtermism that aren't predicated on dubious assumptions are the parts predicated on absolutely bonkers assumptions. The core idea sounds reasonable enough, but once you start digging into the actual arguments, it quickly devolves into clownshoes nonsense. The public face of the movement is the banal and agreeable assertion that it's important to care about future generations, then the actual ideological content of the movement is largely stuff like arguing it's okay to use slavery and genocide today to help pave the way for something like a galaxy-spanning network of planet-sized servers that host a population of trillions upon trillions of "digital people" living in simulated utopias. It's basically just the philosophy of using faintly ludicrous assumptions about the future as an excuse not to care about the suffering caused by our actions today.

On an individual basis, or I suppose in a small process therapy group, the underlying values & beliefs could be brought, at least in part, to the surface & discussed.

We take so much of our foundational beliefs, without even noticing it, from our upbringing, social interactions & education. These foundational aspects are important to the stability of society but they are seldom examined in an objective way for their actual plausibility. These beliefs often persist when their function & usefulness has long passed.

On a larger scale, such beliefs gradually evolve often with great suffering & turmoil. Consider the transition of western cultures from Christianity & feudalism, to Capitalism, scientific inquiry, & triumphant technology, and now to recognition of life extinction on a mass scale & what to do about an 8,000,000,000 population. (Shades of Hegel's dialectic in all of this.)

Or for that matter, the Islamic belief system fighting for relevancy in the modern world of science, capitalism, democracy, religious freedom, value fluidity, & gender issues.