What could make morality objective?

[Peter Holmes]

I don't see why you're getting the vapours. I've never proposed discriminating against people on the grounds of their religiosity. That's a great big straw man. Care to retract that charge?

I've simply pointed out that an existence-claim is NOT a causal claim. Instead of getting all peacock about it, why not just agree you're wrong and move on? Would that be so hard or shameful?

No. You have drawn a distinction without a difference between theists and atheists. And so I shall hold you to account until you provide some empirical evidence for your claim

Oh dear. This is the kind of self-reinforcing dishonesty I've come to expect from Mr Can. I was coming to expect better of you. I'm out at this point.

[TimeSeeker]

I don't see why you're getting the vapours. I've never proposed discriminating against people on the grounds of their religiosity. That's a great big straw man. Care to retract that charge?

I've simply pointed out that an existence-claim is NOT a causal claim. Instead of getting all peacock about it, why not just agree you're wrong and move on? Would that be so hard or shameful?

No. You have drawn a distinction without a difference between theists and atheists. And so I shall hold you to account until you provide some empirical evidence for your claim

Oh dear. This is the kind of self-reinforcing dishonesty I've come to expect from Mr Can. I was coming to expect better of you. I'm out at this point.

Don’t be too quick to climb on your high horse.

Verificationism/falsification is a high bar to meet. Certainly one most philosophers do not wish to be held accountable to (I can’t imagine why).

[Immanuel Can]

The way I use it - it is a social construct. It is grounded in consensus.

This is quite a different claim from saying that words are infinitely flexible. Now you're saying they're concretized by social consensus. But if they are objects of social consensus, then society is agreeing about something.

What is that something? Where do we get the objective starting point in order to generate the signifiers, but from reality itself?

You see, it's not totally free-form. Words don't morph in a vacuum. They are attempts to approximate realities. The realities are the objectivity. There is a signifier, but only because there is also an attempted signified.

Absent an attempted signified, there is nothing to communicate at all. Then it's all cats walking on keyboards.

[TimeSeeker]

What is that something? Where do we get the objective starting point in order to generate the signifiers, but from reality itself?

Another fallacy of gray!

Yes. The concept 'reality' is a placeholder. Reality is SOMETHING. The word 'reality' requires 1 bit of information to be represented/store in your head.

But then you have to DESCRIBE it. You know - in detail.
What is it like? What does it do? You know - that stuff you call 'ontology'


You don't know anything ABOUT reality. Because it's made-up of 3.28 x 10^80 particles!

You don't have that much MEMORY in your head to store that many objects. Let alone the relationships between them.
Let alone the interactions between them.
Let alone all the possible states they can enter.

And because your brain is too tiny to compute all that complexity all you have is a model. Thanks to the Kolmogorov Complexity all you can ever have is a model. So good luck finding Truth...

[TimeSeeker]

This is quite a different claim from saying that words are infinitely flexible. Now you're saying they're concretized by social consensus. But if they are objects of social consensus, then society is agreeing about something

*yawn* some words can be concretized by consensus. Some words can't.

Cat? easy! Point at it (and the disruptor found a distinction in fur color anyway)
God? Not so easy!
Harm? Easier than God! We have examples to go by until you develop an intuitive feel for what 'harm' is.

The reason all of this is all foreign to you is because you are unfamiliar with type theory.

There are no such things as 'cats' or 'humans'. They are TYPES.

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

[Immanuel Can]

Not according to wikipedia:

A wiki is not an authoritative source. It's an open-source place where experts and non-experts alike get their crack at contributing, and editing is often a bit spotty. A good scholarly source does either the same or better every time. But in this case, I didn't even ask you to accept my opinion, far less those of an anonymous wiki contributor. I gave you the original source itself. All you have to do is read it, and you'll know that this is a case of a Wiki not quite getting things right.

P.S. -- I'll happily get to your applied moral questions, just as soon as we've established that an objective morality is even possible. Otherwise we've got the cart before the horse here.

[TimeSeeker]

Not according to wikipedia:

A wiki is not an authoritative source. It's an open-source place where experts and non-experts alike get their crack at contributing, and editing is often a bit spotty. A good scholarly source does either the same or better every time. But in this case, I didn't even ask you to accept my opinion, far less those of an anonymous wiki contributor. I gave you the original source itself. All you have to do is read it, and you'll know that this is a case of a Wiki not quite getting things right.

P.S. -- I'll happily get to your applied moral questions, just as soon as we've established that an objective morality is even possible. Otherwise we've got the cart before the horse here.

Appeal to authority. Wikipedia shows the common use/meaning of terms. As adopted by SOCIAL CONSENSUS.

To appeal to experts is to appeal to minority opinion.

You are putting the horse before the cart again - is objectivity even possible???

[uwot]

That is only true if you equate science and empiricism. Essentially that was the project of logical positivism, inspired partly by Wittgenstein's adage "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent." It is a crude equation that few people hold these days, for the simple reason that empirical investigation of science in practice quite clearly shows that science doesn't work like that. You can get round that by invoking 'no true Scotsman', but that would just demonstrate the incommensurability I was on about.

Drop the language and think like a scientist.

Any scientist in particular? Insufferable as it may be, that is how I talk.

Cause and effect. If a belief is something tangible then it has real-world consequences.

I have no idea what you mean by "tangible" in this sentence. Is belief in fairies tangible, or is it the fairies themselves?

One's behavior is a complex function of multiple variables. We are speculating whether belief features as a significant variable to one's behavior.

More so than knowledge, in my book.

It is exactly the same experiment as Schrödinger's cat, but with beliefs. The cat is both dead AND alive.

Then you misunderstand Schrödinger's cat. It was a joke to demonstrate the apparent absurdity of superposition. If it were true, I would suggest it undermines your claim to be able to make accurate predictions which are anything but lucky guesses.

What measurement would you take to collapse your uncertainty?

And you tell me to drop the language.

Only insofar as YOU can draw a meaningful distinction between the two!

Which I believe I can.

1. Are you using the very definition of 'belief' I am currently busy dismantling? I have NO idea what it means to "believe in X".
2. Can you give me YOUR testable/falsifiable definition for your conception for the ontology of a god?

The clouds part, a big bloke with a white beard appears and says 'Peek-a-boo.'

[uwot]

Fine as an instrumentalist, but knowledge of what?

Of self and my (and our!) ability to predict and control our environment.

Right. That's instrumentalism.

[Immanuel Can]

Your analysis of what constitutes harm is correct: things and actions we may call harmful by one criterion we may instead call beneficial by another.

And yet you claim the word 'good' and its cognates are free of this subjective, judgemental use - that being good is an objective property, for example of the particular god you suppose exists, or of the actions that god supposedly commanded, such as infant genital mutilation.

This mixes up human epistemology with ontology. Whether or not good exists objectively is one question; whether or not all human beings have unimpeded knowledge of this objective truth is another. If you overlap them, you come to think that human mistakes regarding meaning have some impact on the actual existence of the things they misunderstand.

They don't. Those are separate concerns: both legitimate in their own sphere, but the ontological, not the epistemological, is in view in the OP.

The MGB description of a god...

I haven't put that description forward here. Let's not get into Anselm et al.

Our present problem is that we haven't established the basis of moral accusation -- namely, the possibility of an objective moral claim. Nothing can be objectively morally problematic in a world in which there is no objective morality.

[uwot]

Verificationism/falsification is a high bar to meet. Certainly one most philosophers do not wish to be held accountable to (I can’t imagine why).

Nor, by your account most scientists:

I think most scientist would acknowledge that there is no method to the madness.

[TimeSeeker]

Any scientist in particular? Insufferable as it may be, that is how I talk.

I am not much concerned with your language - only your mindset. If there is a heater in a room - you expect the
temperature in that room to go up. Because that is what heaters DO.

So even if you don't see the heater you would still observe the temperature in the room going up!
You can't have a physical object without a physical consequence. That would be an object that does not interact with the physical world in any detectable/measurable way!

If it has mass - it has gravity. Then we can measure its gravity. I guess dark matter doesn't quite fit the bill but such is our weird wonderful universe.

What are the observed consequences of a 'belief'?

I have no idea what you mean by "tangible" in this sentence. Is belief in fairies tangible, or is it the fairies themselves?

I don't understand what you mean by "belief in fairies" either. What do you DO with this belief? Do you go fairy hunting in the forest every weekend and come back empty handed? Do do you just SAY you do (or don't) believe in fairies when asked, never to remember it again until the next time somebody ask you?

Is your belief in fairies something you USE? And if not - then what is it for?

Then you misunderstand Schrödinger's cat. It was a joke to demonstrate the apparent absurdity of superposition. If it were true, I would suggest it undermines your claim to be able to make accurate predictions which are anything but lucky guesses.

It is not a joke? It represents epistemic uncertainty. You DON'T KNOW if the cat is dead or alive. Until you open the box - both hypothesis must remain live in your mind! If you assert either or before opening the box - you are doing so without evidence. That is - you are guessing.

Your conception of a guess is dichotomized! In statistics anything that is better than random (entropy) is a useful guess! If I guess better than random 50 times in a row - that isn't luck! Or at least - statistically, it is very improbable that it is luck.

The clouds part, a big bloke with a white beard appears and says 'Peek-a-boo.'

On this planet or another planet?

[TimeSeeker]

Nor, by your account most scientists

Yes. Because most scientists aren't as privileged as I have been. I work in an environment where omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence are not such crazy ideals. Software engineering. We control all the variables in the system. Even time. We have real-time information on anything we choose. We can change/modify anything we choose. The only limits we deal with are the laws of physics and money.

Which is why I can grok what the concept of power/control/precision/complexity means when most scientists can't. I have experienced it and mastered it because I iterate/fail faster than they do.

I create complex systems (which is where my bias for constructivist epistemology, which is kinda similar to creationism if you squint your eyes a little) comes from.

And so IF we are inside a quantum computer simulation right now - then I have a pretty good idea what the peeps who built it (call them God if you will) are capable of doing to our universe. Without us ever knowing.

[uwot]

...even if you don't see the heater you would still observe the temperature in the room going up!

Yes, but should you hypothesise that the increase in temperature is due to a heater you cannot see, your hypothesis is underdetermined, because there are alternative explanations which could account for exactly the same increase. It is not either there is or isn't a heater, nor even a superposition of heater/non-heater.

You can't have a physical object without a physical consequence. That would be an object that does not interact with the physical world in any detectable/measurable way!

Well yeah, a belief corresponds to some brain state we don't yet fully understand, and then if you get into chaos and the butterfly effect it could destroy the universe.

If it has mass - it has gravity. Then we can measure its gravity. I guess dark matter doesn't quite fit the bill but such is our weird wonderful universe.

Well, dark matter is one hypothesis for why galaxies aren't torn apart by centrifugal forces.

Is your belief in fairies something you USE? And if not - then what is it for?

I've no idea where you get the impression that I believe in fairies.

You DON'T KNOW if the cat is dead or alive. Until you open the box - both hypothesis must remain live in your mind!

Fair enough; you do get the joke.

Your conception of a guess is dichotomized! Anything that is better than random is a useful guess! But when I guess better than random 50 times in a row - that isn't a lucky guess!

Could be.

The clouds part, a big bloke with a white beard appears and says 'Peek-a-boo.'

On this planet or another planet?

Well, according to many theists god is omnipresent, so any planet with reliable witnesses will do.

[uwot]

And so IF we are inside a quantum computer simulation right now - then I have a pretty good idea what the peeps who built it (call them God if you will) are capable of doing to our universe. Without us ever knowing.

You need to make that IF bigger. Yeah, it's an hypothesis, so now you have to "think like a scientist" and provide the evidence. Bit like Mr Can and his god.