People do sometimes use philosophical terms like “intelligence” imprecisely, in confusion- and error-generating ways. But that is not the same sort of meaninglessness as Star Trek’s mad libs. If you think something is that meaningless, and it didn’t come from fiction, then you’re probably missing something important.
“The morality of an act is an emergent phenomena of a physical system” means “It is possible in principle to produce a model and definition of morality in terms of a physical system”. This is useless to people who want details of that model which could be used to classify actions as moral or not. It’s kind of like answering “Where are my keys?” with “Your keys exist!”. Useless, but certainly not meaningless; if someone instead told you, “Your keys do not exist!”, then you’d infer the interesting-and-important fact that your keys had been destroyed. The implications of “morality is not an emergent phenomena of a physical system” would be considerably more abstract, philosophical, and difficult to translate into action, but there would be interesting implications.
People do sometimes use philosophical terms like “intelligence” imprecisely, in confusion- and error-generating ways. But that is not the same sort of meaninglessness as Star Trek’s mad libs. If you think something is that meaningless, and it didn’t come from fiction, then you’re probably missing something important.
“The morality of an act is an emergent phenomena of a physical system” means “It is possible in principle to produce a model and definition of morality in terms of a physical system”. This is useless to people who want details of that model which could be used to classify actions as moral or not. It’s kind of like answering “Where are my keys?” with “Your keys exist!”. Useless, but certainly not meaningless; if someone instead told you, “Your keys do not exist!”, then you’d infer the interesting-and-important fact that your keys had been destroyed. The implications of “morality is not an emergent phenomena of a physical system” would be considerably more abstract, philosophical, and difficult to translate into action, but there would be interesting implications.
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