orca-covenant
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User ID: 1931
orca-covenant
7mo ago
Fellow Tetrapod by Dan Bensen, an absolutely delightful speculative-biology scifi novel. The premise: there are countless parallel versions of Earth, and in many of these sapient species have arisen, each from a different branch of life. There are sapient net-casting spiders that communicate by weaving puppets of their interlocutor, sapient hagfish that move about by extruding stilt-like rods of mucus, sapient crows that ride on the shoulders of domesticated hominids, sapient squirrels whose brain is mostly animated by strains of toxoplasma, and so on.
Two of these species (rotifers that form clonal colonies ruthlessly at war with each other and intelligent robots created by a long-extinct dinosaur race), have discovered how to cross between universes, and created a UN-like organization dedicated to building peaceful trade relations between sapient species. The protagonists are the representatives of humanity in this organization, about half a dozen of people rather neglected by their bosses on our Earth and looked down on by the members of senior, more affirmed species, trying to optimize humankind's position in the multiverse. The author has really done his readings on evolutionary biology, physiology, psychology, and so on; the novel comes with a proper bibliography.
orca-covenant
7mo ago
Hardly unique to the activist left: "your rules, enforced fairly > your rules, enforced unfairly" is heard commonly even around here.
orca-covenant
7mo ago
Exactly. We do environmental genetic testing all the time in our lab, and even in the best case the results are full of "unknown" -- partly because most DNA gathered is too damaged to be identified, and partly because we don't have genetic data available for all random protists and bacteria that are swarming in every cubic millimeter of dirt.
orca-covenant
7mo ago
Moral teaching regarding what, if I may ask? I swear it's not a polemic question, I honestly know nothing about this matter.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
True, and fair enough.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
The observable defining line between Science and "science" is that the former confines itself to areas that can be thoroughly and rigorously mapped, and the latter does not.
If you're of the view that physics is the only science worth of the name, perhaps. It's absolutely not the case for biology. If you could see from the inside what a mess taxonomy is, to mention one subfield...
orca-covenant
8mo ago
This has little to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve altering your body with future technology. Transhumanism is centrally about making the human condition better, not sidegrades like becoming the other sex.
Changing from a sex to another per se may not be the sort of objective upgrade championed by transhumanism, but changing from "constrained by your biology at birth" to "able to modify your biology as you see fit" definitely is -- a central part of transhumanism, even.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
The wilderness may have no people telling you what to do and how to do it, but it has Nature telling you so, and Nature can be far crueler and more demanding than any human tyrant. Although I suppose that depending on your personality and temperament it could still be more tolerable.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
Indeed, consider the use of gas in the First World War: the idea was "if we try this new hideous weapon once, we will break through the enemy, the war will be over immediately, and many fewer lives will be lost in the end". What actually happened is that the new weapon turned out less infallible than expected, the other side immediately started using it as well, and the bloodbath went on as before, with one more hideous weapon thrown in the mix. Worth noting that even Nazi Germany, not exactly well-regarded for their humaneness or reasonableness, refrained from using gases in WW2 because they were afraid of this happening again (while of course having no scruples in using them against captive civilians who could not fight back -- restraint from self-interest, not from compassion).
(Arguably, nuclear weapons might have been an exception, but in my understanding Japan was already burning and starving by that point, so they couldn't have mounted much more of a fight with or without nukes.)
orca-covenant
8mo ago
With that they can deduce my biological sex (with a karyotype) and my ethnicity (with finer sequencing), but they still couldn't find my specific identity unless my DNA is already in a database somewhere (which is probably the case for people for whom this kind of security is an issue) that they have access to (less likely). Tbc, this is hypothetical, I haven't purchased their services and I probably wouldn't go to these lengths if I did.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
I considered installing that one, and apparently one of their payment options is to mail them an envelope full of cash. Can't beat that, I guess.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
I appreciate your responses a lot, they’re great.
Thanks. I'm enjoying this opportunity to have a little debate; I'm always worried I come off as too hostile.
That would be an act of faith and does not follow from atheism.
Well, of course it wouldn't. But the thing is, the nihilism and hedonism you attribute to the "thinking atheist" do not follow either. Per se, atheism comports precisely one belief: that there is no god, for commonly used definitions of "god". Any other belief, assumption, axiom, or statement has to be added on top of that -- and then you can be Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, or Peter Singer. If your worldview is formed of atheism alone (as opposed to having atheism as a component), then you end up with no beliefs about values and ethics at all, and that is not the same as having the belief "Nothing has value" or "I should act only for my own pleasure" (which, in turn, are not the same as each other). Those are no less additional assumptions than "I should care about other people's wellbeing"; pure atheism does not favor the former two over the last one.
Athanasius should take a few more steps and try to imagine the most motivating belief system, and this would look awfully similar to theism — hell maybe he would develop something even better than religion.
Perhaps so. If you asked me to develop the most motivating belief system I can, I'd come up with some variety of pantheism in which all conscious beings are actually the same, like in that The Egg short story (and actually I'm doing something like that in a scifi setting I've been working on), but then I'm far from an expert in philosophy or psychology. At any rate, as I argued in other posts, I'd be wary of taking up false beliefs because they are expedient. Much like naive hedonism and naive act utilitarianism, it ends up undermining itself.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
The question is not whether human experience is significant to the universe [...] i[t']s whether it's significant to humans.
On that subject, I like how the final paragraphs of Last and First Men put it (mild spoilers for a 90-years old philosophical fanta-evolutionary anthropology novel):
Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things.
Man was winged hopefully. He had in him to go further than this short flight, now ending. He proposed even that he should become the Flower of All Things, and that he should learn to be the All-Knowing, the All-Admiring. Instead, he is to be destroyed. He is only a fledgling caught in a bush-fire. He is very small, very simple, very little capable of insight. His knowledge of the great orb of things is but a fledgling's knowledge. His admiration is a nestling's admiration for the things kindly to his own small nature. He delights only in food and the food-announcing call. The music of the spheres passes over him, through him, and is not heard.
Yet it has used him. And now it uses his destruction. Great, and terrible, and very beautiful is the Whole; and for man the best is that the Whole should use him.
But does it really use him? Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness.
But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
If the whole human endeavor disappears without a trace, leaving no influence, and no one remembers them, then by definition it has no impact or significance on the universe.
No. But what of it? The question is not whether human experience is significant to the universe (what would it even mean for something to be significant to the universe? The universe is not a conscious being able to perceive significance), is whether it's significant to humans. Which it pretty obviously is, since human experience might be a vanishingly small fraction of the universe, but it's the totality of, well, itself. Humans are the ones who decide how humans behave, so who or what but humans should be the judge of human significance? (I would also question whether the end of human existence is really the same as never having existed in the first place. From an eternalist perspective, which in my understanding is perfectly compatible with godless metaphysics, then the universe has always about to be affected by humans, and will forever have been affected by humans. If Joe Smith dies today, the statement "Joe Smith is alive the 16th of August 2023 CE is still forever true.)
If I give someone a kidney but they die immediately, it had no greater significance. In other words, it didn’t matter.
And if they live five more years and then die? Does it still not matter? You can do plenty of stuff in five years. Human life may be short, but it's not zero; the way I saw it put somewhere, "the difference betwee zero and one is as reat as that between one and infinity". You are drawing a dichotomy in which either something has infinite value or it has none at all. It might make no difference to the galaxy of Andromeda, but... why should the kidney donor and the doctors care more about the perspective of the galaxy of Andromeda than that of the kidney receiver? (Why should they care less abut Andromeda, you may say. Well, it happens that they do, with or without the permission of gods and philosophers, and they can't help but do so. There's good practical, material reasons for that -- see below.)
Those “good feelings” I create in others will cease to matter one day, so what were they for?
What indeed? They were for feeling good. By that standard you should never enjoy vacations because eventually you return to work, never eat good food because eventually it's going to run out, never enjoy spending time with older loved ones who will die before you, etc. And yet people do enjoy these things. As a matter of fact about human psychology, eternity has never been a prerequisite for enjoyment. This whole argument starts from an assumption that happiness and human endeavours and whatnot are only worth experiencing if they last forever. This is not an assumption that everyone shares.
What’s more, my moral intuitions have no greater purpose and are just an accident. This we know from science.
Which science? The science I found suggests that moral intuitions derive pretty logically from game theory and our evolutionary history, and are in fact very useful in order to put a society together. It's absolutey not an accident that parents love their children and that people dislike murderers (with all the imperfection you'd expect from a soul that runs on warm gristle). Will a cool pseudoNietzsche Free Spirit defector in a society of blithe cooperators end up maximizing their own hedonic pleasure? Groups of cooperators tend to be much stronger and lasting than lonely defectors. Plus, you and I are built out of the same goop, crawled out of the same pond and climbed down the same tree, so our fundamental moral drives are not likely to diverge much, barring actual pathology, which is not cured by prayer. We have moral instincts jury-rigged by evolution that are not easily discarded (even the Nazis had to put in effort to avoid pitying their victims), and we have self-interested reasons to use them. If you ask me, that's more than enough reason to at least attempt to behave morally. Deities seem to me wholly superfluous, much like they're superfluous to explain the shape of continents once you have plate tectonics. Perhaps you might think that an atheist who behaves well out of fear of punishment is not Really being moral, but...
I need not care about humankind because I won’t be judged for it.
... If you really only care about children or spouses or siblings or close friends or favorite artworks or landscapes or foodstuffs or pastimes or whatever because you're threatened into compliance, I don't see what makes you different from the hypothetical Nietzschean Ubermensch who behaves well because it's in their long-term self-interest. But I doubt that's the case. If God Almighty showed up and said to every being in the universe I reward only good pebblesorters, I don't care about this moral stuff, would you then behave like the "thinking atheist" you describe?
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful response, I hope I managed to be at least a bit worthy of it.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
After reading the whole thread (The Motte: "The choice is so obvious, how could anyone disagree" Also the Motte: 40,000 words of debate in a day) it seems to me that the choice depends from what you're planning to achieve:
- If you want to save yourself, red is the clear choice;
- If you want to save a group of people with whom you can reliably coordinate, either by explicit communication or by sharing similar thought patterns (a group sharing your values, if you will), red is again the best;
- if you want to save everyone, blue is the most likely to succeed.
orca-covenant
8mo ago
If humanity is a temporary blip in eternity, human actions do not matter in the grand scheme of things.
... Why? Why does moral importance require taking up a share of the universe's lifespan? Human experience is already 100% of what humans can ever experience. Whether you find that imporant or not, I do not see how a long existence of gas clouds before and afterward makes any difference. Do you think your life would be more "meaningful", whatever that means, if you found out that the universe was created 150 years ago and will be destroyed in another 150 years? Do you think a person who lived in the Upper Paleolithic, when there was only about a million people on Earth, had 8000x the moral value of a person living in the modern world, with its eight billion inhabitants?
orca-covenant
9mo ago
It sounds like we agree for the most part.
Perhaps we do -- I'm starting to think we agree on the facts of the matter and were just using different definitions of "common sense".
orca-covenant
9mo ago
Why would the bumps on someone's head make them evil. That's not common sense.
It's not common sense now, because everyone now knows that phrenology is balderdash. But once you know that intelligence and personality reside in the brain, but don't know exactly what the anatomy and function of each part of the brain is, it seems quite natural to believe different personalities are due to different brains → differences in the physical shape of the brain correspond to differences in personality → differences in a particular area of the brain correspond to differences in a particular aspect of personality, e.g. time preference or empathy → differences in the shape of the brain correspond to visible differences in the shape of the braincase → observing the shape of the skull allows one to make specific inferences about its owner's personality.
Thinking you can predict someone's propensity to, say, alcoholism, by the shape of their skull is not inherently less commonsensical than thinking you can predict it from their genes. A priori, there's a perfectly plausible causal path either way. That's why you need to proceed with actual scientific research instead of stopping at common sense.
orca-covenant
9mo ago
For most of human history, most visions of war were written down by the warrior aristocracy that got the best training, the best weapons, and the best treatment when made prisoners. I'm sure the young baron who grew up with tales of chivalry was having a blast when he rode into battle on a 800 kg warhorse, clad head to toe in glimmering steel; the dozen peasant conscripts armed with a rusty sickle that he trampled on his way there might have had a different perspective (or for that matter their families, who could look forward to starvation when their crops and tools had been burned, their livestock slaughtered, and half their workforce murdered).
Outside of that warrior aristocracy, it's not that difficult to find moral opposition to war, even in antiquity:
It is considered wrong to murder one man, and there is capital punishment for this crime. Then the crime of killing ten men is ten times as bad as that of killing one, and the punishment should be also ten times as much. The crime of murdering one hundred persons is one hundred times as bad, and the punishment should be also one hundred times as much. At this time, in this case, every gentleman under the heaven knows how to condemn it, and calls it wrong or crime.
But the greatest crime is to invade another country, killing many men. Nobody condemns it, but praises it. Because no one knows it is wrong to go to attack an other nation, they write about their glorious victory in order to let the future generations read it. If they could discover the wickedness of war, what is the pleasure of writing such a record of it?
It is just like a man who calls a little black black, and calls much black white. He cannot tell black from white. It is bitter when little is tasted. He calls it sweet when much bitterness is tasted. So he cannot tell bitter from sweet. Little wrong is wrong; everybody condemns it. But the greatest wrong, that of attacking another country, is not only left uncondemned, but is honored and praised. It shows that the world cannot tell right from wrong.
– Mozi (墨子), ca. 400 BCE (source)
orca-covenant
9mo ago
It seems to me this somewhat stacks the deck by making two assumptions:
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That this belief has no consequences outside of how the person feels in their final moments, but a lessened fear of death might very well lead to pointlessly shortening your life.
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That the consequence in question is positive, but for each man who dies foretasting Heaven, there's probably another who dies in terror of Hell. Similarly, believing your dead loved ones to be damned is probably as distressing as believing them blessed is uplifting.
In general, though, my real objection is that making yourself believe propositions because you benefit from such belief regardless of its truth is extremely dangerous. As the saying goes, once you've told a lie (even to yourself), truth is ever after your enemy. As I wrote in another post somewhen before, deluding yourself for expediency (and I contend that, even if the afterlife actually exists, believing that for any reason other than its factual truth is delusion) is the epistemic equivalent of the naive consequentialist doctor who would kill a patient to save five people with their organs. In the short term, it might work, but on the longer term it will poison your epistemology and make you unable to distinguish truth from falsehood.
orca-covenant
9mo ago
The two things could still be mutually excluding possibilities: If it's impossible for a thing to exist without a cause, than the Uncaused Cause is impossible too, much like a circumference-less circle is impossible; if that's not the case, then there's no reason there must be only one from which everything else is caused. You can, of course, say that everything needs a cause to exist except for a special uncaused being that is an exception to the general rule; but then the statement collapses to "assuming that one and only one Uncaused Cause exists, then one and only one Uncaused Cause exists".
orca-covenant
10mo ago
but he kept using that term.
He kept mentioning it, which is quite different.
orca-covenant
10mo ago
Then I guess we agree after all, especially about the nitpicking. Cheers!
orca-covenant
10mo ago
Admittedly passwords make for something like an ideal case for torture in that they can be easily communicated in full and be quickly and unambiguously checked for correctness. I don't know if any other kind of information meets those requirements. Overall, given precedents, I think a blanket ban on judiciary torture is worth a lot more than the marginal improvements in investigation effectiveness, even from a coldly utilitarian perspective, much like a blanket ban on killing patients to harvest their organs is well worth the loss of a small number of additional organs, even if those are perfectly good for use.
Putting a statute of limitations on revanchism is a good idea, but not one very compatible with the establishment of the State of Israel in the first place.
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