As a warming up exercise, try the tree story with something actually contentious:-
Alice: rainbows exist, I can see one over there.
Bob: rainbows don’t exist, there is no arch in the sky, they are an illusion.
Charlie: A physical phenomenon produces rainbows, but they are not as they appear.
Etc, etc.
Alice: Qualia exist, I’m.having several right now.
Bob: there is no empirical evidence for qualia, because no instrument can detect them.
Keith: Qualia can’t exist, because they are non physical by definition. They must be illusions.
Alice: illusions of qualia are qualia.
Etc, etc.
Alice: I have free will, because it seems to me that I can raise my arm or not as I please.
Bob: Thou Art physics, so thou hast no free will.
Charlie: You are still a cause.
Bob: I am a caused cause, so I am not free.
Etc, etc.
Alice: Ethics is objective because it seems to me that torturing kittens a wrong , and that’s a basic fact about the universe.
Bob: Everything is physics , so there are no n in natural facts, so moral realism is false. You intuitions are irrelevant.
Mike: Science is based on intuition just as much as moral realism, it’s intuitions all the way down, baby.
Etc, etc.
Alice: Quarks exist, we have scientific and therefore empirical evidence.
Bob: Actually, we have never made a direct observation of an isolated quark … Quarks are kind of inferred from the nature and behaviour of nucleons … they are in the nature of explanatory posits.
David: well, of course, science is all conjecture, there is no evidence of anything and empiricism and induction don’t work!
Bob: that’s a bit extreme, but we can agree that science uses explanatory conjectures as well as empiricism and induction.
Note the lack of agreement about what empirical evidence even is, and about how science works. That’s the very beginnings of the problems with “Lol, just use science”.
Except… how good are you, really, if you are stuck asking the same questions as a 12 years old child?
Probably not very, but philosophy isn’t stuck there, since it has plenty of highly technical debates.
But the most ironic is that if one actually goes on a long philosophical journey in search for the answer to the question “How can we know things about the external world at all?”, then, in the end of this heroic quest, after the three headed dragon is slain, kingdom of reason is saved and skeptics are befriended along the way, on the diamond mural written in golden letter will be found the answer.
And this answer will be: “Pretty much by looking”.
Here’s why not:-
The evolutionary argument guarantees that you can know just enough for your survival, and only that, things like which berries to eat and animals to avoid being eaten by. (
There’s no evidence at all that it’s “optimal”).Typical philosophical problems, about ontology and epistemology, the real nature of things, have no relevance to survival, so the evolutionary argument doesn’t tell you they are soluble. Not everything is on the same footing. Some things are visible, and subject to direct feedback, other things arent.
To shown that empiricism works, you need to show that empiricism*alone” works, and it works for everything , including the tricky edge cases. And you can’t infer all that from the fact that it works in one , simple case.
The limitation doesn’t just apply to philosophy, it also applied to science , because science does try to answer questions about the nature of things … scientific realism … as well as making reliable predictions, instrumentalism. Realism depends on the interpretation of observation, which in turn depends on conjecturing explanatory models …models don’t just drop out of the data. Conjecture is a conscious, creative and cognitive process, not something that happens automatically as part of perception. Scientific epistemology is complex, combining conjecture , deduction of predicted observations from models, confirmation/disinformation of models, incremental changes to models, and wholesale abandonment of models.
There are direct quantifiable tests for predictive accuracy , but no way of directly comparing a map to the territory. Scientific realists hope and assume that empirical adequacy adds up to ontological correctness .. but it isn’t necessarily so.
One way of making this point is that ontologically wrong theories can be very accurate.
For instance, the Ptolemaic system can be made as accurate as you want for generating predictions, by adding extra epicycles … although it is false, in the sense of lacking ontological accuracy, of failing to correspond to reality, since epicycles don’t exist.
A further way to see this point to notice that ontological revolutions can make merely modest changes to predictive abilities. Relativity inverted the absolute space and time of Newtonian physics, but its predictions were so close that subtle experiments were required to distinguish the two, and so close that Newtonian physics is acceptable for many purposes. Moreover, we can’t rule out a further revolution, replacing current scientific ontology.
Our inability to make direct comparisons between map and territory extends to an inability to tell how close we are to the ultimately accurate ontology,. Even probablistic reasoning can’t tell us how likely our theories are in absolute terms. We only know that better theories are more probably correct than worse ones, but we don’t really know whether current theories are 90% correct or 10% correct, from a God’s eye point of view.
Moreover, we can’t safely assume we are making steady, incremental progress towards the ultimately accurate ontological picture for just the reason already given—sligh changes in predictive accuracy going from one theory to another can be accompanied by major changes in ontology.
and your brain that interpret and aggregate those signals, forming a mental model of the world, to be created by evolution through natural selection, optimizing for inclusive genetic fitness in this world, far from the case that philosophers are all Hegel style rationalists.
And Its also not the case that you have to make positive claims about apriori reasoning to point out the limitations of empiricism. And Its also not the case that noticing the limitations of empiricism is the same as refusing to use it at all.
Most of philosophy is going in the opposite direction, doing anything but adding up to normality
Examples, please.
Did we really expect that solving philosophy would invalidate the applied answers of the sciences
Have you solved philosophy? Has anybody?
There’s not much evidence that the looking based approach is solving problems in practice. Rationalists don’t have clear answers to consciousness or ethics—and how would “looking” help in those areas, anyway? Some things are visible, and subject to direct feedback, other things arent.
As a warming up exercise, try the tree story with something actually contentious
It’s a fine exercise for beginners, but I hope we are long past it, at this point.
All the “contentiousness” evaporates as soon as we’ve fixed the definitions and got rid of the semantic confusion.
Note the lack of agreement about what empirical evidence even is, and about how science works.
Granted. This disagreement is resolved the same way still. You gather evidence about interpreting evidence. You reflect on it with your mind. And so on.
Probably not very, but philosophy isn’t stuck there, since it has plenty of highly technical debates.
The “technicality” of the debates is really not the issue here.
The evolutionary argument guarantees that you can know just enough for your survival, and only that, things like which berries to eat and animals to avoid being eaten by. ( There’s no evidence at all that it’s “optimal”)
Are you not familiar with the notion of optimization process? When you are a result of successful replication of imperfect replicators in a competitive environment with limited resources there is quite a lot of evidence for some kind of “optimality”.
Typical philosophical problems, about ontology and epistemology, the real nature of things, have no relevance to survival, so the evolutionary argument doesn’t tell you they are soluble.
If the existed in some kind of separate magisterium where our common knowledge wouldn’t be applicable than yes. Is it your stance?
Some things are visible, and subject to direct feedback, other things arent.
So you use indirect feedback building on top of knowledge of things that are directly visible. I’m rather sure you understand how it works
To shown that empiricism works, you need to show that empiricism*alone” works, and it works for everything , including the tricky edge cases. And you can’t infer all that from the fact that it works in one , simple case.
I can keep applying it to the “tricky cases” and see how things work from there. And this way I can aggregate more and more evidence and so on and so forth. Never reaching absolute certainty but always refining my tools.
models don’t just drop out of the data.
They kind of do, in a manner of speaking. There are several ways to aggregate data in a model. We can try multiple of them and see how these models predict new data, therefore collecting evidence about what kind of models are good at data prediction in general and so refining our tools of model construction.
Being already selected for intuitions related to surviving in the world and not starting from scratch helps quite a lot.
Conjecture is a conscious, creative and cognitive process, not something that happens automatically as part of perception.
Okay I think I understand what is going on here. Are you under impression that I’m trying to bring back the old empiricism vs rationalism debate, arguing on the side of empiricism?
If so, I want to stop you here, as this couldn’t be further from the truth. I believe this whole debate was quite embarrassing and the whole distinction on pure observation and pure cognition doesn’t make sense in the first place. Observation is cognition, cognition is observation. You can skip all the obvious points how one actually needs a brain to make observations—I’ve explicitly mentioned it myself in the post.
There are direct quantifiable tests for predictive accuracy , but no way of directly comparing a map to the territory. Scientific realists hope and assume that empirical adequacy adds up to ontological correctness .. but it isn’t necessarily so.
I’ll talk about it in a future post.
One way of making this point is that ontologically wrong theories can be very accurate.
Yes, that’s totally fine. I don’t think we have any disagreement here.
Our inability to make direct comparisons between map and territory extends to an inability to tell how close we are to the ultimately accurate ontology,. Even probablistic reasoning can’t tell us how likely our theories are in absolute terms. We only know that better theories are more probably correct than worse ones, but we don’t really know whether current theories are 90% correct or 10% correct, from a God’s eye point of view.
[Half joking]
Thankfully, there there doesn’t seem to be any God, so we might as well not care about his point of view too much.
[/half joking]
Yes, it’s all probabilities all the way down, without perfect certainty. This is fine. We can come up with adversarial examples where it means that we were completely duped, and our views are completely disentangled from “true reality” and were simply describing an “illusion”, but
Why would that be likely?
Renaming “reality” to “illusion” doesn’t actually change anything of substance.
Examples, please.
There will be plenty in the future posts. But generally, consider the fact that philosophy reasons in all direction and normality is only a relatively small space of all possible destinations.
Have you solved philosophy? Has anybody?
Well, I’ve went further than many. But it’s not relevant to the point I’m making here.
All the “contentiousness” evaporates as soon as we’ve fixed the definitions and got rid of the semantic confusion.
Of course not. Having clear semantics is a necessary condition for understanding the world, not a sufficient one. You have to look. Among other things.
You gather evidence about interpreting evidence
You can only gather theories about interpreting evidence. You can’t see how well such theories work by direct inspection. It isn’t looking.
This would work much better if you thought about it concretely. Alice says evidence includes introspections, subjective seemings; Bob says it is only ever objective. What do you do next?
When you are a result of successful replication of imperfect replicators in a competitive environment with limited resources there is quite a lot of evidence for some kind of “optimality”.
I doing see why a slug or wallaby is optimising anything, so why should I be? What makes humans the pinnacle of creation?
If the existed in some kind of separate magisterium where our common knowledge wouldn’t be applicable than yes
They exist in a separate magisterium where direct, sensory evidence isn’t applicable, because they are about the causes and meaning of whatever sensory evidence you happen to have. The interpretation of evidence.is a separate magisterium from.You gathering evidence , and not in a spooky way.
So you use indirect feedback
Which is what? Give concrete examples.
I can keep applying it to the “tricky cases
Applying what? You can’t keep applying evidence-gathering to solve the problem of interpreting evidence. It’s unclear whether you are talking about pure empiricism, or.some.kind of vaguely defined solution everything.
And this way I can aggregate more and more evidence
Which is not self interpreting, so you are just creating a bigger and bigger problem.
We can try multiple of them and see how these models predict new data
But they dont, in the trickiest. I’ve already addressed that point: the Ptolemaic model can by adjusted to fit any data.
Being already selected for intuitions related to surviving in the world
I’ve already addressed that point too: you don’t need ontological understanding to survive. You don’t get direct feedback about ontological understanding. So it’s a separate magisterium.
Okay I think I understand what is going on here. Are you under impression that I’m trying to bring back the old empiricism vs rationalism debate, arguing on the side of empiricism?
What’s “looking” if not empiricism?
I’m not arguing for rationalism over empiricism, or against never using empirucism. I’m arguing against pure empiricism as being able to solve all problems. Which is not to say there is something else that does. It’s a mixture of pluralism—there’s more than one kind of epistemic problem and solution—and scepticism—theres no guarantee of solving anything even using more tools than “looking”.
I already said that here :-
And Its also not the case that you have to make positive claims about apriori reasoning to point out the limitations of empiricism. And Its also not the case that noticing the limitations of empiricism is the same as refusing to use it at all.
Yes, it’s all probabilities all the way down, without perfect certainty
No, it’s worse than that. Probabilities require quantification of how true or likely something is. But there is no way of objectively quantifying that for ontological interpretation. And subjective probability leads to perennial disagreement , not convergence.
We can come up with adversarial examples where it means that we were completely duped, and our views are completely disentangled from “true reality” and were simply describing an “illusion”, but
But, that only allows us to reject N false theories , not home in on a single true one. Convergence is a problem as well as certainty.
Renaming “reality” to “illusion” doesn’t actually change anything of substance
If your beliefs are illusory, they are false. That might not make an difference instrumentally, to what you can predict, but you are not assuming instrumentalism and neither is Yudkowsky.
But generally, consider the fact that philosophy reasons in all direction and normality is only a relatively small space of all possible destinations
What’s normality? If you just mean “saving appearances”, rather than predicting something that is empirically disproveable, then most philosophy does that. What doesn’t? Illusionism? But that’s quite popular around here!
I also thought the robot:s answer missed the point quite badly …because it reduced the ought all the way down to an is—or rather a bunch of isses.
If you dismiss any reduction of ought to is,
I don’t. As I said:-
Reducing ethical normativity isn’t bad
Not to what one would. Your ethical module may not be directly connected to the behavioral one and so your decisions are based on other considerations, like desires unrelated to ethics.
Are you saying that’s the only problem? That the action you would have taken absent those issues is the right action, in an ultimate sense?
This doesn’t change the fact that what you ought to do is the output (or a certain generalization of multiple outputs) of the ethical module,
It’s not a fact. There are any number of ethical theories where what you should do is not necessarily what you would do. e.g. Utilitarianism, which is quite popular round here. When you think about maths , that’s neural activity, but it doesn’t follow that it defines mathematical correctness. Errors are neural activity as.well. The normative question is quite separate. Even if want to reduce it, it doesn’t follow that they only way to do so is to have eight billion correct answers.
which is a computation taking place in the real world, which can be observed.
That’s quite irrelevant. The fact that it takes neural activity to output an action tells you nothing about the ethics of the action. “Ought” and “ethical” aren’t just vacuous labels for anything you do or want to do.
there are potentially eight billion answers to what one ought to do.
Potentially but not actually.
Nothing hinges on having exactly right billion right answers. More than one right answer is enough of a problem.
Once again, when you look, turns out individual ethical views of people are not *that* different
Yes they are. Political divisions reflect profound ethical divisions.
There’s a consistent theme in rationalist writing on ethics, where the idea that everyone has basically the same values , or “brain algorithms”, is just assumed … but it needs to be based on evidence as much as anything else.
Not basically the same, but somewhat similar. And it’s not just assumed, it’s quite observable.
The differences are observable. Fraught debates are people disagreeing about the value of freedom.versus equality, etc.
I’m any case, the problem of subjectivism is that there are potentially multiple right answers.
Human ethical disagreements are mostly about edge cases. Like what is your objective claim here, that human values are not correlated at all?
No. I don’t accept that ethics “is” whether values you happen to have, or whatever decision you happen to make.
It’s social constructivism of morality. Which is rooted in our other knowledge about game theory and evolution.
If morality is socially constructed , the robot is wrong about metaethics. What the robot should do.is follow the social rules, and if its programming is something different, then it’s actions are object level wrong.
.
Yes, this is exactly my point. A lot of things, which are treated as “applied missing the point answers” are in fact legitimately philosophically potent. At the very least, we should be paying much more attention to them.
Is the robot missing the point or not?
Therefore it’s not just “by looking” but “pretty much by looking”. I completely agree about the necessity to abandon the notion of certainty
That’s just the start. The tricky question is now much else we need to abandon. In particular , it’s not clear whether convergence on a single most likely theory of everything is possible, even if you have abandoned certainty.
As a warming up exercise, try the tree story with something actually contentious:-
Alice: rainbows exist, I can see one over there.
Bob: rainbows don’t exist, there is no arch in the sky, they are an illusion.
Charlie: A physical phenomenon produces rainbows, but they are not as they appear.
Etc, etc.
Alice: Qualia exist, I’m.having several right now.
Bob: there is no empirical evidence for qualia, because no instrument can detect them.
Keith: Qualia can’t exist, because they are non physical by definition. They must be illusions.
Alice: illusions of qualia are qualia.
Etc, etc.
Alice: I have free will, because it seems to me that I can raise my arm or not as I please.
Bob: Thou Art physics, so thou hast no free will.
Charlie: You are still a cause.
Bob: I am a caused cause, so I am not free.
Etc, etc.
Alice: Ethics is objective because it seems to me that torturing kittens a wrong , and that’s a basic fact about the universe.
Bob: Everything is physics , so there are no n in natural facts, so moral realism is false. You intuitions are irrelevant.
Mike: Science is based on intuition just as much as moral realism, it’s intuitions all the way down, baby.
Etc, etc.
Alice: Quarks exist, we have scientific and therefore empirical evidence.
Bob: Actually, we have never made a direct observation of an isolated quark … Quarks are kind of inferred from the nature and behaviour of nucleons … they are in the nature of explanatory posits.
David: well, of course, science is all conjecture, there is no evidence of anything and empiricism and induction don’t work!
Bob: that’s a bit extreme, but we can agree that science uses explanatory conjectures as well as empiricism and induction.
Note the lack of agreement about what empirical evidence even is, and about how science works. That’s the very beginnings of the problems with “Lol, just use science”.
Probably not very, but philosophy isn’t stuck there, since it has plenty of highly technical debates.
Here’s why not:-
The evolutionary argument guarantees that you can know just enough for your survival, and only that, things like which berries to eat and animals to avoid being eaten by. ( There’s no evidence at all that it’s “optimal”).Typical philosophical problems, about ontology and epistemology, the real nature of things, have no relevance to survival, so the evolutionary argument doesn’t tell you they are soluble. Not everything is on the same footing. Some things are visible, and subject to direct feedback, other things arent.
To shown that empiricism works, you need to show that empiricism*alone” works, and it works for everything , including the tricky edge cases. And you can’t infer all that from the fact that it works in one , simple case.
The limitation doesn’t just apply to philosophy, it also applied to science , because science does try to answer questions about the nature of things … scientific realism … as well as making reliable predictions, instrumentalism. Realism depends on the interpretation of observation, which in turn depends on conjecturing explanatory models …models don’t just drop out of the data. Conjecture is a conscious, creative and cognitive process, not something that happens automatically as part of perception. Scientific epistemology is complex, combining conjecture , deduction of predicted observations from models, confirmation/disinformation of models, incremental changes to models, and wholesale abandonment of models.
There are direct quantifiable tests for predictive accuracy , but no way of directly comparing a map to the territory. Scientific realists hope and assume that empirical adequacy adds up to ontological correctness .. but it isn’t necessarily so.
One way of making this point is that ontologically wrong theories can be very accurate.
For instance, the Ptolemaic system can be made as accurate as you want for generating predictions, by adding extra epicycles … although it is false, in the sense of lacking ontological accuracy, of failing to correspond to reality, since epicycles don’t exist.
A further way to see this point to notice that ontological revolutions can make merely modest changes to predictive abilities. Relativity inverted the absolute space and time of Newtonian physics, but its predictions were so close that subtle experiments were required to distinguish the two, and so close that Newtonian physics is acceptable for many purposes. Moreover, we can’t rule out a further revolution, replacing current scientific ontology.
Our inability to make direct comparisons between map and territory extends to an inability to tell how close we are to the ultimately accurate ontology,. Even probablistic reasoning can’t tell us how likely our theories are in absolute terms. We only know that better theories are more probably correct than worse ones, but we don’t really know whether current theories are 90% correct or 10% correct, from a God’s eye point of view.
Moreover, we can’t safely assume we are making steady, incremental progress towards the ultimately accurate ontological picture for just the reason already given—sligh changes in predictive accuracy going from one theory to another can be accompanied by major changes in ontology.
And Its also not the case that you have to make positive claims about apriori reasoning to point out the limitations of empiricism. And Its also not the case that noticing the limitations of empiricism is the same as refusing to use it at all.
Examples, please.
Have you solved philosophy? Has anybody?
There’s not much evidence that the looking based approach is solving problems in practice. Rationalists don’t have clear answers to consciousness or ethics—and how would “looking” help in those areas, anyway? Some things are visible, and subject to direct feedback, other things arent.
It’s a fine exercise for beginners, but I hope we are long past it, at this point.
All the “contentiousness” evaporates as soon as we’ve fixed the definitions and got rid of the semantic confusion.
Granted. This disagreement is resolved the same way still. You gather evidence about interpreting evidence. You reflect on it with your mind. And so on.
The “technicality” of the debates is really not the issue here.
Are you not familiar with the notion of optimization process? When you are a result of successful replication of imperfect replicators in a competitive environment with limited resources there is quite a lot of evidence for some kind of “optimality”.
If the existed in some kind of separate magisterium where our common knowledge wouldn’t be applicable than yes. Is it your stance?
So you use indirect feedback building on top of knowledge of things that are directly visible. I’m rather sure you understand how it works
I can keep applying it to the “tricky cases” and see how things work from there. And this way I can aggregate more and more evidence and so on and so forth. Never reaching absolute certainty but always refining my tools.
They kind of do, in a manner of speaking. There are several ways to aggregate data in a model. We can try multiple of them and see how these models predict new data, therefore collecting evidence about what kind of models are good at data prediction in general and so refining our tools of model construction.
Being already selected for intuitions related to surviving in the world and not starting from scratch helps quite a lot.
Okay I think I understand what is going on here. Are you under impression that I’m trying to bring back the old empiricism vs rationalism debate, arguing on the side of empiricism?
If so, I want to stop you here, as this couldn’t be further from the truth. I believe this whole debate was quite embarrassing and the whole distinction on pure observation and pure cognition doesn’t make sense in the first place. Observation is cognition, cognition is observation. You can skip all the obvious points how one actually needs a brain to make observations—I’ve explicitly mentioned it myself in the post.
I’ll talk about it in a future post.
Yes, that’s totally fine. I don’t think we have any disagreement here.
[Half joking]
Thankfully, there there doesn’t seem to be any God, so we might as well not care about his point of view too much.
[/half joking]
Yes, it’s all probabilities all the way down, without perfect certainty. This is fine. We can come up with adversarial examples where it means that we were completely duped, and our views are completely disentangled from “true reality” and were simply describing an “illusion”, but
Why would that be likely?
Renaming “reality” to “illusion” doesn’t actually change anything of substance.
There will be plenty in the future posts. But generally, consider the fact that philosophy reasons in all direction and normality is only a relatively small space of all possible destinations.
Well, I’ve went further than many. But it’s not relevant to the point I’m making here.
Of course not. Having clear semantics is a necessary condition for understanding the world, not a sufficient one. You have to look. Among other things.
You can only gather theories about interpreting evidence. You can’t see how well such theories work by direct inspection. It isn’t looking.
This would work much better if you thought about it concretely. Alice says evidence includes introspections, subjective seemings; Bob says it is only ever objective. What do you do next?
I doing see why a slug or wallaby is optimising anything, so why should I be? What makes humans the pinnacle of creation?
They exist in a separate magisterium where direct, sensory evidence isn’t applicable, because they are about the causes and meaning of whatever sensory evidence you happen to have. The interpretation of evidence.is a separate magisterium from.You gathering evidence , and not in a spooky way.
Which is what? Give concrete examples.
Applying what? You can’t keep applying evidence-gathering to solve the problem of interpreting evidence. It’s unclear whether you are talking about pure empiricism, or.some.kind of vaguely defined solution everything.
Which is not self interpreting, so you are just creating a bigger and bigger problem.
But they dont, in the trickiest. I’ve already addressed that point: the Ptolemaic model can by adjusted to fit any data.
I’ve already addressed that point too: you don’t need ontological understanding to survive. You don’t get direct feedback about ontological understanding. So it’s a separate magisterium.
What’s “looking” if not empiricism?
I’m not arguing for rationalism over empiricism, or against never using empirucism. I’m arguing against pure empiricism as being able to solve all problems. Which is not to say there is something else that does. It’s a mixture of pluralism—there’s more than one kind of epistemic problem and solution—and scepticism—theres no guarantee of solving anything even using more tools than “looking”.
I already said that here :-
No, it’s worse than that. Probabilities require quantification of how true or likely something is. But there is no way of objectively quantifying that for ontological interpretation. And subjective probability leads to perennial disagreement , not convergence.
But, that only allows us to reject N false theories , not home in on a single true one. Convergence is a problem as well as certainty.
If your beliefs are illusory, they are false. That might not make an difference instrumentally, to what you can predict, but you are not assuming instrumentalism and neither is Yudkowsky.
What’s normality? If you just mean “saving appearances”, rather than predicting something that is empirically disproveable, then most philosophy does that. What doesn’t? Illusionism? But that’s quite popular around here!
I don’t. As I said:-
Are you saying that’s the only problem? That the action you would have taken absent those issues is the right action, in an ultimate sense?
It’s not a fact. There are any number of ethical theories where what you should do is not necessarily what you would do. e.g. Utilitarianism, which is quite popular round here. When you think about maths , that’s neural activity, but it doesn’t follow that it defines mathematical correctness. Errors are neural activity as.well. The normative question is quite separate. Even if want to reduce it, it doesn’t follow that they only way to do so is to have eight billion correct answers.
That’s quite irrelevant. The fact that it takes neural activity to output an action tells you nothing about the ethics of the action. “Ought” and “ethical” aren’t just vacuous labels for anything you do or want to do.
Nothing hinges on having exactly right billion right answers. More than one right answer is enough of a problem.
Yes they are. Political divisions reflect profound ethical divisions.
The differences are observable. Fraught debates are people disagreeing about the value of freedom.versus equality, etc.
I’m any case, the problem of subjectivism is that there are potentially multiple right answers.
No. I don’t accept that ethics “is” whether values you happen to have, or whatever decision you happen to make.
If morality is socially constructed , the robot is wrong about metaethics. What the robot should do.is follow the social rules, and if its programming is something different, then it’s actions are object level wrong. .
Is the robot missing the point or not?
That’s just the start. The tricky question is now much else we need to abandon. In particular , it’s not clear whether convergence on a single most likely theory of everything is possible, even if you have abandoned certainty.