Whatever you call them, I like seeing them at the top. Your own postings would be hugely improved by the addition of abstracts.
PrawnOfFate
It is extremely unlikely that the Universe is a simulation for a wide variety of reasons, foremost amongst them being expense
Unless our simulator are fooling us about the expense of computational power.
For example: yes, crime rates are higher among certain genetic subgroups of people
...in certain societies
How can something be fundamental and artificial?
I think he might have an ontological claim in mind as well, although I can’t see how anyone could get at the ontology without going through the epistemology.
..like the ones in The Matri, who allowed its denizens to evolve to knowledge of virtual reality, rather than keeping them at a medieval level, or using the bio-energy of sheep...
But I am more interested in the epistemic mistake people keep making. People keep assuming that it is possible for simulatees to know what is going on outside the simulation (or, equivalently, that basic laws must be same).
I don’t mind if it’s turtles all the way down.
The claim that reality may be ultimately unknowable or non-algorithmic is different to the claim you have made elsewhere, that there is no reality.
- 13 Apr 2013 19:31 UTC; -2 points) 's comment on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) by (
So where did you address it?
All that’s needed to is reject the idea that there are some mysterious properties to sensation which somehow violate basic logic and the principles of information theory.
Blatant strawman.
Maths isn’t very relevant to Rand’s philosophy. What’s more relevant about her Aristoteleanism is her attitude to modern science; she was fairly ignorant. and fairly sceptical, of evolution, QM, and relativity.
Uncomfortable truth warning:
Atheists have to concede that religions is widespread because people are in some sense wired up for it. Getting rid of religion, therefore, does not get rid of religious thinking, feeling and behaviour. This can be seen in the prevalence of quaisi-religious rituals, such as going to concerts to worship “rock gods”, regarding charismatic politicians as “saviours of the nation”, and various other phenomena hiding in plain sight.
A further step, and one that is rarely taken, is realising that atheists and ratiinalists aren’t immune. People who identify as atheists don’t want to concede that they might still have some baggage of religious behaviour because that means they no longer firmly in the Tribe of Good People..but that is itself a religious pattern.
A why question has more possible anwers than efficient causality.
Have you read the sequences, specifically the metaethics stuff?
I have, and I found it unclear and inconclusive. A number of people have offered to explain it , and they all ended up bowing out unable to do so
Moral philosophy on LW is decades (at the usual philosophical pace) ahead of what you would learn elsewhere and a lot of the stuff you mentioned is considered solved or obsolete.
I find no evidence for that claim.
Is unpleasantness the only criterion? Nobody much likes criticism, but it is hardly rational to disregard it becuase you don’t like it.
I don’t think they have the space of all possible agents in mind—just “rational” ones.
I keep saying that, and Bazinga keeps omiting it.
- 19 Apr 2013 19:35 UTC; -2 points) 's comment on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) by (
Noone should care about “possibilities”, for a Bayesian nothing is zero. You could say self-refuting / self-contradictory beliefs have an actual zero percent probability, but not even that is actually true: You need to account for the fact that you can’t ever be wholly (to an infinite amount of 9s in your prior of 0.9...) certain about the self-contradiction actually being one. There could be a world with a demon misleading you, e.g.
That being said, the idea of some One True Ethics is as self-refuting as it gets, there is no view from nowhere,
What is a “view”? Why is it needed for objective ethics? Why isnt it a Universal Solvent? Is there no objective basis to mathematics.
and whatever axioms those True Ethics are based upon would themselves be up for debate.
So its probability would be less than 1.0. That doesn’t mean its probability is barely above 0.0.
The discussion of whether a circle can also be a square, possibly, can be answered with “it’s a possibility, since I may be mistaken about the actual definitions”,
But the argument you have given does not depend on evident self-contradiction. It depends on an unspecified entity called a “view”.
But with neither answer would “it is a possibility, ergo I believe in it” follow.
So? For the fourth time, I was only saying that moral realism isn’t obviously false.
The fool who says in his heart … and all that.
Also, I think you might like this relevant link.
I did. But I was a bit puzzled by this,..
″ we should believe the Bible because the Bible is correct about many things that can be proven independently, this vouches for the veracity of the whole book, and therefore we should believe it even when it can’t be independently proven”
.. which,even as the improved version of, a straw man argument is still pretty weak. The Bible is a compendium of short books written by a number of people at disparate periods of time. The argument would work much better about a more cohesive work, such as the Koran....
(No, Kawoomba, I did not admit to being a Muslim...)
I have never argued from the “queer object” notion of moral realism—from immaterial moral thingies.
. It’s whether your particular ethical system—or any particular ethical system—can be said to be not only right from your perspective, but right for any intelligent agent—aliens, humans, AI, whatever.
Yep. And my argument that it can remains unaddressed.
Moral realism postulates the existence of a kind of “moral fact” which is nonmaterial, applies to humans, aliens and intelligent algae alike, and does not appear to be accessible to the scientific method.
What has that got to do with the approachI have been proposing here?
Just imagine...there are countries where education can be discussed without bringing in race at all...