HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
No bio...
User ID: 179
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
But there are some very important questions where there is no scientific consensus: why is there something instead of nothing? What is consciousness? (Incidentally, I'm often confused by the confidence with which atheists reject the possibility of any sort of "afterlife"--they may not know what consciousness is or how it works, but they're positive it disappears when you die! But that's another discussion.) Is morality even real, and if so, how ought we to act? In my view (you may disagree) these questions have resisted scientific explanation since the dawn of time, and they don't seem likely to be scientifically settled anytime soon. I don't want to get too into the weeds of these particular questions, unless you want me to. Suffice it to say that, if we have to wait for "better science" to explain these things, we may be waiting a long time. What should we believe in the meantime? It's not like we can just brush these questions off; they seem super important to any kind of complete worldview! I can't wait for science to catch up; I need to live now!
Why do you feel the need to believe in some explanation for most of these questions? Why is it a problem to simply state that you don't know why there is something rather than nothing or what consciousness is, and thus don't have a belief on the matter?
You're right that these questions are difficult and any solutions/explanations are elusive or woefully incomplete. But it seems to me the only way we're going to solve them, if they are even solvable at all, is by making empirical discoveries about our universe (science) and by applying our capacity to reason. The religious alternative is to believe in explanations given by holy books whose author(s) we have no good reason to believe knew anything more than we do (and usually a lot less). To the extent these holy books have good explanations for any of these questions, we can justify our belief in their explanations by appealing directly to the reasoning and skipping the middle man.
Finally, I don't know that "being convinced of the truth value" of something is necessary to belief. Being convinced of the falsity of an idea is, of course, fatal to belief--but as long as something could be true, and isn't patently less probable than other competing ideas, I don't see why one couldn't believe it. I think everyone relies on heuristics like "meaning" to select their most important beliefs from among several more-or-less-as-likely ideas.
The first problem with that reasoning is that it's not enough for a proposition to be more probable than other competing explanations. Something being 2% probable and all alternatives being <2% probable doesn't mean it's justified to believe it. Which leads to the second problem, which I already mentioned: you're neglecting the possibility of simply not believing any proposition yet offered by anyone.
I could of course quibble over the suggestion that science doesn't have compelling explanations for some or all of the questions you mentioned. But you seem to agree with me that that's a bit of a distraction from the underlying dispute.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
One issue with your thesis is stated succinctly in the "first they came for..." adage. A problem doesn't need to affect you now for you to be justified in being concerned about it and for it to be prudent to fight back against it.
A second issue is that a lot of problems are indirectly caused by a problem further up the chain that might have gone unchallenged when it mattered. Did it affect me that seemingly every institution and corporation in the country decided to get on board with DEI/diversity hires? Probably not at the time and not in any given instance, no. But the downstream effects of that phenomenon certainly affect me now in many ways. But perhaps a lot of the Left's institutional capture would have been mitigated if people cared enough to put a stop to it before these people were hired into prominent positions in the first place.
In other words, you can't just ask "Does this affect me right now? If not, I don't care." You have to ask whether the what's happening now will have predictable consequences that, perhaps after some more iterations, will affect you later.
The advice to get off the internet and touch grass or grill is so utterly risible to me. It is the motto of the unprincipled and the cowardly, as far as I'm concerned. Evil (and problems resulting from good intentions) prevail when good people do nothing, and all that. (Now, if someone is of a certain temperament and simply finds himself too emotionally crippled by the problems of the world to handle hearing about them, I actually have no problem with that person getting off the internet and grilling. We don't literally all have to be engaged with these problems to conquer them. I also don't expect amputees to be conscripted into the armed forces.)
I've never understood why some rationalists act like "faith" is irrational
Because faith is defined as believing something without having a good reason to believe it. If you have a good reason to believe it, then you'd just appeal to the reason and have no need to bring faith into it.
as if you're only permitted to believe in things that are epistemically certain.
In my experience, atheists/rationalists don't claim that certainty is required to be justified in believing something. As you correctly point out, that would be an absurdly high standard that would commit you to a useless stance of Cartesian doubt.
Beyond "cogito ergo sum," there's not much knowledge available to us that's not ultimately based on pragmatic leaps of logic. I can't prove that the world outside my head really exists, or that the past and future really exist, or that causation is real. I don't pretend to understand Godel's incompleteness theorem, but my layman's understanding of it is that even math relies on unprovable assumptions to work. And most of what we call "scientific knowledge" is far more tenuous than these propositions: we say that we know, for example, that an oxygen atom has eight protons, but I've never actually checked.
Not all leaps of logic are equally justified. You may not know anything about the original research that demonstrates how an oxygen atom has eight protons, but you know that scientists have developed systems (that you can distill down to "the scientific method", if you like) to test and discover what things happen to be true about the world we live in and what hypotheses happen not to be true. Planes fly, magic carpets don't. You also know that in general scientists are open about their methods and others who are knowledgeable about the subject matter have the opportunity to replicate and, if appropriate, refute previous findings. If you challenged a scientist of the relevant specialty about whether an oxygen atom has eight protons, you'd know that they'd have the receipts to back it up.
At this point you may be waiting to blurt out "but the replication crisis and the politicization of science!" And you're absolutely correct. But our confidence in any given proposition that comes out of science is proportional to, among other things, how reliable we consider that subfield to be. If we have good reasons to distrust scientists in a particular field of study or doubt a particular finding -- whether because the scientists are politicized (social science) or because figuring out a way to tease out what's actually true is fucking hard (again, social science) -- then we modulate our confidence in any given proposition coming out of that field ("such-and-such remains unclear, more research is needed" is a cliche for a reason.)
The only reliable alternative to bad science is better science. What else could there even be? Holy books? Podcasters and substackers trying to work it out from first principles? Vibes?
Epistemic certainty has to yield to pragmatic utility. Therefore, as long as my religious beliefs aren't provably false (which would be utility-decreasing, because it would cause me to make predictions that turn out to be incorrect, to my detriment), and if those beliefs make me better off (consensus seems to be that religious people tend to be happier and more mentally healthy than nonbelievers), I don't see why it's "irrational" to continue being religious.
It's irrational if don't have a good reason to believe that it's actually true. It may be that believing in a falsehood can be beneficial, but that's a separate argument from whether it's true. If you want to argue that people should believe falsehoods because they're beneficial, you can make that argument (and in this paragraph you seem to be), but be very aware that that's a separate argument from its truth and therefore from whether it's rational to believe that it's true.
And, as an aside, I can't fathom how it could even be possible to believe something that you recognize you have no good reason to be true merely because you think it's beneficial. Belief is an uncontrollable state of being convinced of the actual truth of something, so I can't imagine how belief could even be possible without being convinced of the truth value.
Finally, plenty of prominent rationalists have beliefs that seem just as strange and unfalsifiable as my own religious beliefs
Yes, they do. So don't add to the list.
It's not often that I find myself retreading ground from the Great Atheism War of the Aughts in this era where wokeism has become such a threat that I gleefully find myself allied with evangelicals and even married one and moved to the heart of evangelicalstan to get away from it. But man, I still can't let this shit stand unchallenged.
I'm saying a lot of people seem outraged that the people providing content want to make money from it. You can debate the worthiness of any individual creator or platform, and I also agree that I would prefer to give money directly to creators who produce work I like (and I do) rather than Google.
People created great content on YouTube before the era when they could make money on it. And, indeed, I think the monetization era has resulted in worse content:
- Clickbaity, misleading algorithmically tailored titles and thumbnails
- Childish antics (because kids are simple creatures who click shiny things and, apparently, people making dick-sucking faces)
- Padded video lengths (again, the algorithm)
- Padded video release schedule (again, the algorithm)
- Sponsored content (and the attendant conflict of interest in cases like tech reviews)
- Native, in-video ads read from a script by the creator themselves
- Georestrictions for legal reasons related to monetization
- Self-censorship to avoid demonetization or stay kid-friendly (profanity, or even apparently non-profane words like "suicide"; content (like guns or violent footage); verboten opinions on culture war issues, especially trans)
- Niche creators branching out to into the mainstream because that's where the money is, abandoning their focus on the niche topic
And that's just the creator side. On the hosting side there's an army of programmers hell-bent on increasing engagement and ad revenue at any and all cost, from UI changes (removing the dislike button, making everything huge and eye-catching as opposed to information-dense), heavily prioritizing recent videos, playing very fast and loose with search query matching (it shows you results only faintly related to your query if they're extremely popular, because it calculates that you're more likely to click on it), prioritizing well-known and official channels in search results despite not matching your search query as well as a niche channel.
I'd literally pay to return to the pre-monetization YouTube era. I am so fucking disgusted whenever I have to use YouTube to find something (DIY, tech reviews, some old funny thing I saw and want to look up again, footage of some recent event in the news, etc.) I cannot overstate the despair, revulsion, bitterness, and disdain I harbor about how fucking shit YouTube (and essentially the entire internet, honestly) has become over the last decade or so.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I think you need to differentiate killing humans versus killing animals. I think it's common for people to be more disturbed by videos of animal cruelty than even the most gruesome tortures and executions of human beings. I wouldn't assume that someone who has difficulty killing an animal would have difficulty killing a person that they felt justified in killing.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Look, I’ve never served in the military and never seen combat. I’ve never watched anybody die. I’ve never even been in a fistfight. It’s possible that my intuitions around this issue are totally miscalibrated.
But yes, it does seem very likely to me that the modal female soldier is substantially less effective in close combat than the modal male soldier is.
I don't have direct personal experience here either, but I am a connoisseur of police bodycam footage. Having watched well over a thousand of them at this point (I know because I download them and can count how many are in the folder), I can confidently offer my opinion, whatever it's worth, that women are indeed substantially worse than men at dealing with life or death situations, on average. And presumably female police officers are already a more selective group than female conscripts in this regard.
There are commendable exceptions, of course, but in general I notice women are just far more likely to become paralyzed with fear or behave erratically and clumsily, doing things like confusing their gun for a taser, or confusing their taser for a gun and just generally exhibiting less courage and tactical intuition and improvisation. The difference in physical strength obviously comes into play, too.
Given the obvious difference in evolutionary pressure between the sexes with regards to violence, I think our baseline expectation, even in the absence of evidence and anecdotes, should be that there's a significant sex difference here.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
2 is the best option, you'll notice that everyone from amateur streamers to professional e-sports teams use it even when sitting right next to each other. The same is true for any team doing anything remotely high performance even if everyone is sitting in the same room- ie NASA mission control, military command centers, Formula 1 race teams, etc.
Alright, we've given this a try, but the problem seems to be that our voice is picked up on the other person's microphone, creating an echo. For example, if I talk, I can hear myself in my headphones because my voice reaches my wife's computer's microphone. I'm not sure how this can be avoided - obviously microphones aren't intelligent enough to know whose voice is being heard and selectively mute if it detects a voice other than the person using the computer associated with that microphone.
Is this perhaps solved by using microphones very close to the mouth (e.g., on a headset) and setting their input sensitivity to a level where the user's voice is picked up but another person in the same room is not?
Or do people in this sort of situation just tolerate hearing themselves through their own audio?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Except, in my experience, the same people who are sympathetic to the nonviolent members of the J6 mob also howl in outrage when the actually violent members of the J6 mob face criminal sentences for their acts. And again, I'm fine with insisting on there not being a double standard between the J6ers and the Summer 2020 protesters. I absolutely agree there was a double standard, and I'm open to the suggestion that J6ers get off the hook just out of fairness. But these people seem to believe that the J6ers did basically nothing wrong (or at least nothing wrong beyond the realm of trivial misdemeanors), not just that they ought to be treated lightly to keep with the Summer 2020 standard.
That's what boggles my mind - the suggestion that they did nothing wrong. I can only assume these people didn't bother watching the videos, or that they're just that thoroughly mind-killed from perpetual incubation in the culture wars? I really don't know. I don't get it. If you can see all the video footage and think "Nope. Basically just lost tourists. No violence of any significance. No transgression of anything important happening here", then the inferential distance between them and me is so vast as to not be bridgeable.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
So yeah, they're not judged as harshly because the standards changed. We weren't aware they had changed, but media consensus dictatated otherwise. And this is somehow incomprehensibly alien to you? Come now. That's a pose.
I think I didn't do a good enough job explaining what I mean, so I can genuinely see how you would think that. To clarify, I'm fine with outwardly downplaying J6 because of the new standard that Summer 2020 wrought. What I'm confused and concerned about is that some people seem to believe that J6 wasn't bad on its own merits. As in, if Summer 2020 hadn't happened, it seems some people still wouldn't think J6 was a big deal and that the perpetrators still shouldn't have been charged or even condemned. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding them.
So what if I think J6 qualified as violent by some technical metrics? So does play-shoving a friend, and I'm not going to entertain anybody calling that violent just because Webster says so. So if BLM wasn't violent, then neither was J6. As I said before, this is indeed partly cynical. But is also deadly serious. I refuse to call J6 violent because of the valence of that word
As I explained to FC, it's not that Jan 6 was bad "because it was violent", as if we're robotically applying a flowchart of "matches dictionary definition of violent" -> "is therefore worthy of condemnation and criminal charges". Jan 6 was worthy* of condemnation and criminal charges because of what actually happened there. I don't care what words you want to use to describe it. I care that people see what happened and condemn what they're seeing as harshly as I believe it ought to be condemned. Yet so many people seem to have convinced themselves that it wasn't actually a big deal and that we don't actually see what we can plainly see on video.
* Again, on its own merits. There's a reasonable argument to be made that the new standard of Summer 2020 compels us to go light on J6ers, at least outwardly.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I'm familiar with that classic essay, but that's not at all describing what I'm doing. I think the Jan 6 mob's behavior was, on its own merits, worthy of contempt, shame, and mass criminal charges. This is not because I'm lazily applying words like "violent" and letting my opinion of the event be colored by the baggage the word and its central examples come with. I don't particularly care what words you or anyone else want to use to describe it, as long as we agree on what actually physically happened there on the ground (which, alas, I'm not so sure we all do. You seem perhaps more reasonable than some other posters in this regard).
My opinion of the Jan 6 mob also has absolutely nothing to do with the detestable behavior of the 2020 rioters and their shameful defenders in the Blue Tribe. I still can't fathom how one's opinion of the two even could be related. As if our opinion of the perpetrators would change in a counterfactual world where one event happened and the other didn't. That is such an alien moral framework to me I don't even know how to begin to understand it.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Even granting everything you just said for the sake of argument, I still don't understand how that can or should result in someone actually believing in the privacy of their own mind that Jan 6 wasn't violent and bad. Or do you suspect that the people on The Motte claiming such things are being mask-on even here?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
If the BLM riots didn't qualify as violence in popular sentiment, then who is to say J6 should?
You are! And I am! As intelligent beings capable of reasoning on our own. It's fine to say to a Blue Triber who defended the 2020 rioters, "Hey, if you thought summer 2020 wasn't violent, then I won't grant you that Jan 6 was violent. Your rules!" But you shouldn't believe that yourself in the privacy of your own mind merely because you're rubbing your opponents' noses in their hypocrisy.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Now you are claiming that people who disagree with your assessment of Jan 6th are as bad as the pro-BLM riot people. Suppose that is true: so what? The pro-BLM riot people were rewarded with vast political, financial and social benefit from their actions. Negative consequences were extremely rare, limited to only a very few of the most egregious examples. Why should one be ashamed of an action to which no shame or censure seems to attach?
I'm not sure I'm accurately understanding what you're saying. It seems to me that you're saying it's acceptable to lie about what constitutes violence as long as the other side got away with that lie too? I'm all for holding people to their the standards they set, and as such I don't want to hear one bit of whining about January 6 from people who defended the 2020 rioters. But I'm concerned that some people here seem to be actually believing that January 6 wasn't violent and wasn't a bad thing simply on account of the other side being dishonest about these categories the year prior. I think it matters what's actually true and it's important not to become so focused on pointing out the Calvinball the other side is playing that we convince ourselves that falsehoods are true.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
It seems to me that you are attempting to appeal to common ground and common sense. You are pointing out that this is, in fact, a mob, and that this mob is, in fact, physically fighting the cops, and that that is violence, so therefore this is a violent event. This is true.
That's all I'm saying!
But you are talking to people who have made this exact appeal in the past, in the face of considerably worse violence, and who were told categorically by both their social peers and by the government and knowledge-production class as a whole that what they were seeing was not lawless violence, because the violence was a small minority of a given event, as in fact it is in the Jan 6th video you linked. The common ground you are appealing to has already been burned, and there is no way to get it back. This is the closest to a consensus on political violence that you are likely to ever see. It will only get worse from here as incidents accumulate.
I'm extremely sympathetic to the complaint of the obvious double standard. I don't understand why we can't acknowledge that 1) both Jan 6 and Summer 2020 were violent and bad; 2) Summer 2020 was more violent; 3) people who defended the Summer 2020 riots should be called out and shamed.
Some people seem to have this bizarre need to believe that if Jan 6 is claimed to be more violent than Summer 2020 but isn't, then that must mean Jan 6 wasn't violent or even bad. No! That's not how logic works!
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
it still looks... fairly peaceful?
Then, by my estimation, you're no different than the people who stood in front of the scenes of riots in the Summer of 2020 and declared they were Mostly Peaceful. Sorry.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
The claim that the Jan 6 mob was polite and peaceful is one of the most astonishing claims I see repeated in this otherwise pretty reality-grounded community. I don't understand how you can make claims like this when we have widespread video evidence of how violent the mob was. Like, are you just unaware of the video footage? Or are you of the belief that the existence of some footage showing peaceful and orderly intruders "cancels out" the violence, like some sort of algebraic exercise? I cannot overstate how baffling I find this.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
@Hoffmeister25 has written a bit about this in the past. Here's a couple conversations with him about this on the old site. He's also still here and presumably happy to talk about it.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Depends on the topic, of course. Also, people's opinions will obviously vary as to what is a compelling book on any given topic.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Thanks, we'll give it a try! The last time we did that was before my wife and I married and moved in together, so perhaps the latency on a LAN with a proper voice chat program will be negligible enough.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
For those of you who play video games in the same room as someone else, how do you communicate with each other over the sound of the game itself? My wife and I like to play video games together, but we haven't figured out a good solution to the sound problem. Some obvious possibilities and their downsides:
- We both wear headphones. The problem with this is that we would have to lower our volumes so much to hear each other past the game sounds and the headphones' partial external sound dampening.
- We use microphones and join a voice chat together on Discord or something. The problem with this is that we can still hear each other's voices in the physical world, so then the microphones' delay causes a double perception which is quite confusing and jarring. And even if we had sufficiently soundproof headphones (which cost money we don't really have), microphone delays are just so goddamn annoying because of the unintentional interruption of someone who started speaking a second earlier than you (likewise on Zoom meetings).
- We use speakers. Obviously this is a problem because we're not necessarily in the same location in the game, so each of our game's sound would bleed into each other messily and confusingly.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
If you stay outside of the US for too long then there is a chance the local politics of your new home may start to negatively impact your mental health.
Yep, I just permanently moved from Canada to the US this summer. Never been happier! And yes, politics and the culture war more broadly is a huge part of why.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
The thing is, Musk/Gates/Bezos/etc. don't actually "have" 100000x the median wealth. Their "wealth" is simplistically calculated from the stocks they own in their companies. But they couldn't just cash out those stocks and dive into their wealth like Scrooge McDuck. First of all, they would have to find buyers. There's no one alive who would buy $200b in one stock, which means you'd need multiple buyers. But there also aren't $200b worth of multiple buyers waiting around for any one of these stocks at their current price.
Which brings us to the second problem: they'd have to substantially lower the amount they're willing to sell their stocks for, in order to find enough buyers. First, this would substantially lower their net worth (which, recall, is crudely calculated by stock value times quantity of stocks). More importantly, if they were to attempt to sell all their stocks in this way, the market would immediately assume they know something dire about their companies' prospects and the value of the stock would plummet.
So, the mega wealthy like Musk/Gates/Bezos have their wealth locked into their companies and can't unlock it to any substantial degree - they're going down with the ship if they try.
That's not to say they aren't very wealthy - they are. They can leverage their tremendous stock assets to essentially get huge loans to fund a lavish lifestyle ("Hey, loaner, I have a gazillion dollars in stock. Wanna lend me a tiny percentage of that in cash? I'm a low-risk borrower because, if I default, well, here's all this collateral!"). But it's not, like, a hundred billion lavish.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I also wasn't going to give my opinion on this ban because I don't consider myself a high-quality contributor. But if no mod notes is indeed the bar, I'll chime in (I have 842 comments here and on the subreddit with no warnings/bans and, to my knowledge, no mod notes).
I'm in favor of the ban and think way more banning should be done in general. I think way too many people treat warnings and bans like it's a fee they get to pay in exchange for getting to be rude to someone they disagree with. They know exactly what they're doing - they know it's against the rules when they submit their comment. They just don't care. They think the other guy deserves it, so they'll pay the ban tax and take a day off.
I think most of these people would bite their tongue if there were real, significant consequences.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
It's entirely valid to ask why someone may want a mod that turns this character white.
Why?
We speak of belief as a binary matter - you either believe something or you don't - but in practice it's a matter of degrees of confidence. For any given proposition, you have some degree of confidence in its truth (even if it's near-zero) and at a certain threshold it's high enough that you say you believe it. But it's just semantics.
Well, I'm sorry, but that's just not a good reason to believe something. That doesn't negate the real feelings you describe and the challenge of dealing with them, but it's not going to be convincing to anyone else as a justification for believing what you believe, nor will anyone else be have any reason to think that you're justified in believing it yourself.
It depends on the action. Sometimes our actions are justified based on information we have good reason to believe about the physical world (e.g., floors hold our body's weight, and putting one foot in front of the other repeatedly on this floor will soon take you to your kitchen), or about our minds (e.g., you want to walk to the kitchen because you're hungry).
But your later remarks make me think that what you're really trying to get at is essentially "how do we know how to treat other people", i.e., morality. Well, I think you already know that that's a deeply controversial and unsolved topic at an abstract level. Let's consider the approaches on offer.
Consider the religious approach to morality: that God tells us right from wrong. I think the best rebuttal to that has remained unchanged for a couple thousand years when it was introduced by Plato, if I'm not mistaken. It runs as follows. Suppose God says killing is wrong. Did he have some reason to say that it's wrong? Or could he have just as easily said that it's always right to kill anybody else (in which case it would be right because he said it's right)? If you say either that it would still be wrong to kill even if God said it was right, or that God wouldn't/couldn't say killing is right because he had a reason for saying killing is wrong, well then we can appeal directly to the reason and skip the middle man.
Now consider the non-religious approach to morality, which uses science and reason. Let's start with science. Science can provide us information about the world and the predictable consequences of certain actions. Why is this important? Well, take witchcraft for example. Hunting witches and punishing them isn't actually irrational - if there really was a witch casting spells to harm other people, she really should be punished, or even killed! It only doesn't make sense if witchcraft isn't actually a thing. But belief in witches is nearly a cultural universal among primitive humans because the default operating system of Homo sapiens does not allow much room for the intuition that random bad shit sometimes happens. Rather, if a person you care about gets sick or your crop fails, the primitive human believes there must have been a witch that cast a spell to cause it. Today, science has afforded us actually correct explanations for events that used to be explained by witchcraft. That helps shape our morality - i.e., how we "should" act - in an instance like this.
And science's role in morality is far more extensive than finding better explanations for calamities than witchcraft. Again, it provides a more informed understanding of the physical world, and a large part of determining what actions are moral is going to be contingent upon facts about the world that we just don't know without science. A lot of that will come down to scientific knowledge about the state of brains and the fact that brain states constitute experiences like pain (and thus whether a certain action will predictably cause pain), but it can also include things like understanding the effects of certain pollutants on our bodies and ecosystems (and thus whether dumping certain waste will harm others).
But science can't bridge the is-ought gap. It can tell us "this action causes another person pain", but not "you therefore shouldn't take this action". That's where reason comes in.
Suppose someone were to say, "Why should I care if I cause you pain or kill you? Your pain isn't my pain, and besides, I'd like to take your possessions after I kill you." Well, he won't convince anyone else that only his suffering matters and no one else's, so he is in no position to object if others were to treat him that way. Since no one wants to be treated that way, and since one's power over others is uncertain (tomorrow you might be in a position to be killed by a bigger man or a larger mob), it's in everyone's interest to collectively agree that randomly killing and pillaging is wrong.
Or suppose someone says, "I don't think it's immoral to inflict cruel and torturous punishment on this bread thief because we need to deter criminals. The harm caused by inflicting pain on him is less than the harm caused by undeterred criminals." Indeed, criminal deterrence is a defensible rationale for causing pain. But if the goal is deterrence, then any harm inflicted in excess of that which is necessary to deter criminals is arguably pointless harm and should be avoided. And surely short imprisonment is enough deterrence for theft. Furthermore, there's a problem of perverse incentives: if a man knows he'll be tortured and executed for stealing a loaf of bread, well then he might as well kill the shopkeeper while he's at it. Since there can be no greater punishment than what is already expected for the theft, he is incentivized to maximize his chances of getting away with it by killing the witness. Therefore, it makes more sense to have a sliding scale of punishment for criminal activity.
Those aren't scientific or religious arguments, but the use of such reason together with the better understanding of the world that we get from science provides us the building blocks for morality. Now, people who have read way too much Hume might object that it's still smuggling in certain first principles like "all else being equal, pain is bad". But you can play that game with anything. How do we know that the law of noncontradiction is compelling - that A cannot equal not-A? Well, it just... sorta... is. You have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps at some point and stop searching for a deeper proposition that isn't self-justifying. And if someone is unconvinced by the starting point that "all else being equal, pain is worse than no pain", then I think that person is either someone with way too much education who likes playing games, or they're not an honest interlocutor.
Not really. I think we all just sort of woke up on this backwater planet in this mysterious universe and are just collectively fumbling our way towards making life better for ourselves using the crude cognitive toolkits we evolved with. That includes figuring out facts about ourselves and the world and using reason to try and persuade each other of the best state of affairs to strive towards.
I do think we have an evolved sense of morality. It seems obvious to me that moral intuitions are innate, and they're certainly a human universal. That doesn't mean those evolved intuitions are actually defensible, though, or provide a good basis for morality. Sometimes they are (e.g., indignation at unfairness) and sometimes they're not (e.g., the lives of that other tribe have no value because they're Others).
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