ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1d ago
There's a pretty long history of dirty theists making arguments along the lines of, "Let's compute how inconceivably improbable it is for intelligent life to spontaneously develop out of simple dead matter." I don't really subscribe to such arguments, but that is neither here nor there. It may be the case that you are unaware of the typical battle lines that have been drawn when they do so. Not being aware of such would be a reasonable explanation for your confusion.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
I must admit, I did not have "intra-atheist squabble over aliens results in arguments that intelligent life may be extremely improbable" on my bingo card. Handwavy BigNum arguments are a typical part of the arsenal. Isn't the entire point of the unfalsifiable multiverse idea to construct a handwavy BigNum argument?
This is quite the claim about a concept that is known to be rather messy. Multiple entire books have been written by philosophers of ethics trying to explore the nature of consent, because it is, indeed, rather messy. One may desire to collapse all the messiness down to a binary state, but that is a significant enough of a claim that it likely requires yet another one of those books written by a philosopher of ethics to argue for. Probably not something that's going to be settled in a MottePost.
To be clear, I think that for some situations (many situations), there is a clean enough mapping from the complex mental state that was present in that situation to a binary consent state. But that mapping is not always clean. One can hold as an axiom that, in theory, such a mapping must always exist, but that would either be an axiom or a claim. If it's a claim, I think it's hard to look at the existing academic work and believe that it has been conclusively shown.
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