“If I could achieve some wonderful thing by showing in an fMRI that I prefer eating salad and avoiding cheeseburgers, I’ll be first in line.”
It was “make salad taste better than cheeseburgers”, not “prefer to eat salad”. This analogy may be muddled by the fact that tastes can in fact be deliberately changed over time; wherein belief in belief can actually become belief, become reality. But the fact remains that if someone offered you a millions dollars, right now, to truthfully claim you prefer the taste of salad when you in fact did not, you would fail.
I enjoy the sequences in story/dialog form most of all. But all too often the points conveyed in this style seem less significant and helpful to me; typically they are hashing out something that is largely semantics or else describing philosophical tropes.
It doesn’t seem to me that Obert is really a moral objectivist as the duos’ names would suggest—I think their argument is really one of semantics. When he says: “Duties, and should-ness, seem to have a dimension that goes beyond our whims. ”, he is using the word “whim” as a synonym for “want”. Subhan merely has a more inclusive definition of want: “What a brain ultimately decides to do”. It does not seem that Obert would object to the idea that moral constructs are created and stored in the mind, nor would Subhert reject that the brains’ utility function has many differently ordered terms.
The brain sometimes arrives at decisions contrary to immediate whims.
“If I could achieve some wonderful thing by showing in an fMRI that I prefer eating salad and avoiding cheeseburgers, I’ll be first in line.”
It was “make salad taste better than cheeseburgers”, not “prefer to eat salad”. This analogy may be muddled by the fact that tastes can in fact be deliberately changed over time; wherein belief in belief can actually become belief, become reality. But the fact remains that if someone offered you a millions dollars, right now, to truthfully claim you prefer the taste of salad when you in fact did not, you would fail.
I enjoy the sequences in story/dialog form most of all. But all too often the points conveyed in this style seem less significant and helpful to me; typically they are hashing out something that is largely semantics or else describing philosophical tropes.
It doesn’t seem to me that Obert is really a moral objectivist as the duos’ names would suggest—I think their argument is really one of semantics. When he says: “Duties, and should-ness, seem to have a dimension that goes beyond our whims. ”, he is using the word “whim” as a synonym for “want”. Subhan merely has a more inclusive definition of want: “What a brain ultimately decides to do”. It does not seem that Obert would object to the idea that moral constructs are created and stored in the mind, nor would Subhert reject that the brains’ utility function has many differently ordered terms.
The brain sometimes arrives at decisions contrary to immediate whims.