orca-covenant
No bio...
User ID: 1931
If this description is accurate, than this would imply that Marines are a much greater threat to their own society than subway hobos, at least per capita. Being gratified by killing and mutilation, and being likely to uncontrolledly resort to it upon provocation, sounds far, far worse than being unable to hold a job and a home or being numbed by drugs.
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
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
3mo ago
It seems to me that you arrive at whatever is convenient to the politics of the time, since Reason can be used to justify practically anything well depending on your starting priors.
Not wrong, but what alternative is there to Reason that is independent from fads of its time and from initial axioms?
orca-covenant
1yr ago
In my experience libgen has slightly higher quality, but Zlib has books that are not on libgen.
orca-covenant
10mo ago
I'm of the opinion that once you start debating what is or isn't a "real" member of a given category, it's time to switch to E-prime or else risk No true Scotsman-ing your way from Orkney to Newcastle.
I agree, and I would say that every question of the form "Is X a real Y?" should be treated in the same way as one of those "Is a hotdog a sandwich?" that you see around on the web.
orca-covenant
1mo ago
The Fermi calculation is a multiplication of numbers most of which have an uncertainty that spans several orders of magnitude. One can derive any outcome from "there's a civilization in 99% of star systems" to "one civilization every 10,000 galaxies" just by using more optimistic or pessimistic numbers.
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
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
10mo ago
I did once find a study comparing the use of torture in Spanish Inquisition vs. modern USA, which concluded that the former was much more effective because of differences in methods and social context. I hope you will pardon me if I copypaste another a post of mine from elsewhere:
There’s this paper claiming (in the case of the Spanish Inquisition) that there are circumstances in which torture can yield reliable and verifiable information, but only in a very specific setting that is very different from, say, yanking a suspect in an alley and beating a confession out of them. You need extensive prior investigation until you have most of the facts available but think that someone is still withholding information; you need to torture multiple people, repeatedly, while comparing and verifying all the statements you extracted between each instance. At that point you might as well scrap the torture and still be left with the vast majority of reliable information.
Even then, you’ll still end up torturing a large number of innocents, and you will learn very little in the process you didn’t already know. And you will inevitably end up a vast, overbearing police state where everyone lives in terror.
Inquisitors tortured for different reasons, with different goals, based on different assumptions, and in a social, political, and religious setting entirely alien to that of modern interrogators…
The Inquisition put in place a vast bureaucratic apparatus designed to collect and assess information about prohibited practices. It tortured comprehensively, inflicting suffering on large swaths of the population. It tortured systematically, willing to torment all whom it deemed to be withholding evidence, regardless of how severe their heresy was or how significant the evidence was that they were withholding. The Inquisition did not torture because it wanted to fill gaps in its records by tormenting a new witness. On the contrary: it tortured because its records were comprehensive enough to indicate that a witness was withholding evidence.
This torture yielded information that was often reliable and falsifiable: names, locations, events, and practices witnesses provided in the torture chamber matched information provided by those not tortured. But despite the tremendous investment in time, money, and labor that the Inquisition invested in institutionalizing torture, its officials treated the results of interrogations in the torture chamber with skepticism. Tribunals tortured witnesses at the very end of a series of investigations, and they did not rely on the resulting testimony as a primary source of evidence.
This systematic, dispassionate, and meticulous torture stands in stark contrast to the “ticking bomb” philosophy that has motivated US torture policy in the aftermath of 9/11… US interrogators expected to uncover groundbreaking information from detainees: novel, crucial, yet somehow trustworthy. That is an unverifiable standard of intelligence that the Inquisition, despite its vast bureaucratic apparatus and centuries of institutional learning, would not have trusted.
The Inquisition functioned in an extraordinary environment. Its target population was confined within the realms of an authoritarian state in which the Inquisition wielded absolute authority and could draw on near-unlimited resources. The most important of these resources was time… It could afford to spend decades and centuries perfecting its methods and dedicate years to gathering evidence against its prisoners… Should US interrogators aspire to match the confession rate of the Inquisition’s torture campaign, they would have to emulate the Inquisition’s brutal scope and vast resources… one cannot improvise quick, amateurish, and half-hearted torture sessions, motivated by anger and fear, and hope to extract reliable intelligence. Torture that yields reliable intelligence requires a massive social, political, and financial enterprise founded on deep ideological and political commitments. That is the cost of torture.
(an interesting point is that, while the “ticking time bomb” is the scenario most commonly given as justification for torture, it also happens to be the scenario in which torture is least likely to work, because you don’t know if you have the right person, the suspect - especially if guilty - knows they have to resist for a brief time, and you can’t verify any statement until it’s too late)
End copypaste.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
What is the alternative? It's not like those animals are not killed in the production of the regular omnivorous diet. If you are interested in animal welfare, it makes sense to go with the diet that kills the fewest possible animals even if the number is not zero. (Growing all of one's own food? I'm not sure you can get all the range of nutrients with your own work, and you are still going to kill the soil microfauna and plant parasites.Vat-growing food seems the ideal, but it will take a while before that is enough to fully support a human body.)
orca-covenant
1mo ago
IMO that's an interesting but rather strange objection. Doesn't the presence of angels and demons require more flaws in the scientific understanding of physics than fast interstellar travel, not fewer?
Not exactly the same career, but -- won't someone who spent most of their youth learning no skills that are not crime-related, socializing with nobody except other criminals, and is actively discouraged from finding non-criminal jobs and forming non-criminal social connections even after leaving prison, be rather unlikely to become a highly productive member of society, even if they strongly wish to?
orca-covenant
1yr ago
In recent years, I've become very fond of Enya.
orca-covenant
1yr ago
I think that's the phenomenon David Chapman writes about a lot in his essays on Buddhism -- how Westernized "therapeutic Buddhism" has very little in common with how Buddhism is actually traditionally practiced, and if anything resembles more 19th century German Idealism, of all things?
orca-covenant
1yr ago
In history you study kings not peasants.
If you get your idea of history from Medieval sagas, perhaps. In history as practiced by actual historians, social organization, mass migrations, cultural and political shifts, adoption of technology, and other such things that necessarily involve large collections of people are fundamental. Even if we know few specific individuals from a social group, it definitely does not mean the group as a whole cannot have played an important role in history. Can you name a single Sumerian scribe? And yet we owe them one of the most important inventions in the history of our species. As the poem goes, kings deliver little if they don't have servants, soldiers, and quite a lot of peasants doing the actual work for them.
By the way, even actual horses are, in fact, extremely important objects of study in history, having played a fundamental role in many important events (cases in point: the Indo-European expansion, the Germanic migrations into Roman Europe, the Medieval agricultural revolution, the Eurasian steppe empires, the European conquest of the Americas).
orca-covenant
1mo ago
I'm not convinced of that; pessimistic estimates quite easily result in fewer than 1 advanced civilization per galaxy.
orca-covenant
3mo ago
Might be a definition issue. Obviously I don't know the specifics of that discussion, but the person might have meant "useful" as in the "all models are wrong, but some are useful" (i.e., "useful" in the sense that they can be used to build theorems on or make falsifiable hypotheses), rather than in the sense of "having practical applications". If so, I'd be tempted to agree.
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
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
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
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.
orca-covenant
10mo ago
Pardon the question, and I hope it doesn't come across as too provocatory, but -- if there were evidence that believing every statement made by modern Progressivism made your life easier, and on the balance made you happier -- would you then go through this process in order to become a sincere Progressivist?
Well, yeah, if you define "morality" specifically to mean "doing the will of the Christian God", then it's definitely true that without the Christian God there can be no morality. But then this isn't a very useful statement.
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