Perhaps it’s being downvoted because of my strange speculation that the stars are unreal—but it seems to me that if this is a simulation with such a narrow purpose as fooling komponisto/me/us/somebody about the Knox case is would be more thrifty to only simulate some narrow portion of the world, which need not include Knox herself. Even then, I think, it would make sense to say that my beliefs are about Knox as she is inside the simulation, not some other Knox I cannot have any knowledge of, even in principle.
Sticky
What possible world would that be? If it should turn out that the Italian government is engaged in a vast experiment to see how many people it can convince of a true thing using only very inadequate evidence (and therefore falsified the evidence so as to destroy any reasonable case it had), we could, in principle, discover that. If the simulation simply deleted all of her hair, fiber, fingerprint, and DNA evidence left behind by the salacious ritual sex murder, then I can think of two objections. First, something like Tyrrell McAllister’s second-order simulation, only this isn’t so much a simulated Knox in my own head, I think, as it is a second-order simulation implemented in reality, by conforming all of reality (the crime scene, etc.) to what it would be if Knox were innocent. Second, an unlawful simulation such as this might seem to undermine any possible belief I might form, I could still in principle acquire some knowledge of it. Suppose whoever is running the simulation decides to talk to me and I have good reason to think he’s telling the truth. (This last is indistinguishable from “suppose I run into a prophet”—but in an unlawful universe that stops being a vice.)
ETA: I suppose if I’m entertaining the possibility that the simulator might start telling me truths I couldn’t otherwise know then I could, in principle, find out that I live in a simulated reality and the “real” Knox is guilty (contrary to what I asserted above). I don’t think I’d change my mind about her so much as I would begin thinking that there is a guilty Knox out there and an innocent Knox in here. After all, I think I’m pretty real, so why shouldn’t the innocent Amanda Knox be real?
If whoever controls the simulation knows that Tyrrell/me/komponisto/Eliezer/etc. are reasonably reasonable, there’s little to be gained by modeling all the evidences that might persuade me. Just include the total lack of physical evidence tying the accused to the room where the murder happened, and I’m all yours. I’m sure I care more than I might have otherwise because she’s pretty, and obviously (obviously to me, anyway) completely harmless and well-meaning, even now. Whereas, if we were talking about a gang member who’s probably guilty of other horrible felonies, I’d still be more convinced of innocence than I am of some things I personally witnessed (since the physical evidence is more reliable than human memory), but I wouldn’t feel so sorry for the wrongly convicted.
Most people prefer milder drugs over harder ones, even though harder drugs provide more pleasure.
The Constitution is not a complete system of law (it is, if I remember correctly, the shortest national constitution currently in force) -- so, even if we dismiss the amendment process as airily as you do, the strictest originalism doesn’t amount to “live under the exact framework set up by a bunch of very flawed 18th century white dudes forever”, because most of that framework was in the form of statutory law. It’s not clear to me that the amendment process deserves to dismissed the way you did. You call the Founders “very flawed”, which is surely true, but many or most of the ways those flaws were reflected in the Constitution have already been addressed, by amendment. I say that simply to avoid any idea that we need some body such as you suggest simply to make adjustments from time to time.
Nevertheless, a thing may be desirable even if we don’t actually need it. So, do we want “a process by which some trusted, relatively non-political body gropes their way to the solutions to problems”?
As it stands, this is a contradiction. Deciding upon solutions to public problems is what politics is. You are proposing to take the politics out of political decisionmaking. If it isn’t just nonsense, I can only take this to mean taking the democracy out of political decisionmaking. Therefore what’s wanted here is a defense of democracy itself.
Let us suppose that we have some way of knowing that the people chosen really are wise (although I can’t imagine what test we could apply) -- we still can’t trust them. By the very act of distinguishing them from non-members, we give them distinct interests which may well be contrary to the interests of the people. Their very existence as a body is already contrary to the people’s interest in self-government. We are primates, after all, and we derive a significant portion of our subjective happiness from our power and status, which means that having a decision made for you rather than making it yourself is a significant disutility. The decisions would need to be of much higher quality to justify this on utilitarian grounds, but we can’t trust a council of wise elders to give us decisions good enough, because, as I said, by virtue of their position they have different interests from us.
If an AI were available I would still object, because even if it seems Friendly we can’t trust it that much. It might become aware of the fact that it also has interests.
However fundamental they are, they’re still subject to some kind of decision-making. There’s no way around the difficulty: whoever makes the decision has interests, including an interest in expanding his/their own power. If the decision is too fundamental to be made by the people, then we’re saying that precisely the most important matters should be decided by people with interests that may not be those of the people whose interests we’re actually trying to promote, which is the general public. If they’re that much better than us that this makes sense, it’s irrational to leave anything at all to democratic decision-making. Besides, when we give the Supreme Court or the Wise Elders the authority to decide fundamental issues, who gets to decide what a fundamental issue is? Are we going to write it down—and who interprets this written document?
Well, yes. That’s textualism: the decision was made and it’s written down right here.
A Council of Elders who make the decision for us is something else altogether.
The study described in the link only exposed the subject to a single article. The effect might be different for different amounts of exposure.
In my own experience this seems to be the case. When I briefly read politically opposing blogs I find them so obviously stupid that I’m amazed anyone could take the other side seriously, but when I spend a long while doing it I find my views moderating and sometimes even crossing over despite not being convinced by any of their actual arguments, and begin to be embarrassed by figures I normally admire even though most of what I find directed against them are mere pejoratives. Then afterward the effect wears off. I could be unusually easily-led, but I’ve heard of enough other similar experiences that I doubt it.
Although I don’t have any references handy, I’ve seen people argue that Kyoto-like changes in our lifestyles are necessary on ethical grounds apart from global warming. More often they’ll simply dismiss any sort of technological solution as a “quick fix” or even as the thing that caused the problem in the first place.
There are quite a few people who would like to abdicate control over the physical world.
I’m guessing it’s because cute rabbits get eaten less than non-cute rabbits, thus exerting selection pressure in favor of cuteness, which presumably is the same in all… something. Mammals?
Sounds a little strained to me, though.
Not photoshop. That’s a pacifier with plastic buckteeth on the outside. It’s supposed to be funny.
It wouldn’t. That’s supposed to be a side effect.
I’m sure you could contrive a way to kill someone with a bunny.
We find bunnies in general cute, but not humans in general—so it makes sense that a baby bunny would be cuter than a baby human. It combines babyness and bunnyness, as compared to a human baby who only has babyness. We care about the human baby more than the bunny baby because we value humanness quite apart from cuteness.
Anyone who can travel through time can mount a pretty impressive apocalypse and announce whatever it is about the nature of reality he cares to. He might even be telling the truth.
Your usage of “actual” appears to be based on a false cognate.
Is there a difference between having no subjective experience and having one-millionth the subjective experience of a Tra’bilfin, which are advanced aliens with artificially augmented brains capable of a million times the processing of a current human?
This argument fails several ways. First as history. Some of the atrocities happened without central organization—e.g., Islamic fundamentalists aren’t all part of any one organization, although they’ve created a variety of more or less hierarchical organizations; the displacement of the Indians (which had essentially nothing to do with religion except as a stock of rationalizations for things people would have done anyway) -- and all the others had important elements of individual initiative.
(I must say I found it amusing that you concede that the crimes against humanity committed by atheist states weren’t solely the fault of religion. When you start saying things like that, you’ve spent much too long seeing arguments as weapons to be used on behalf of “your side”.)
Second, it refutes a position nobody holds. No religionist believes in a flavor of God-implanted moral sense strong enough to overcome all the various temptations to behave immorally; usually they believe quite the opposite, that it was mostly or totally broken by some sort of Fall. If you find yourself triumphantly refuting a view that cannot in any case survive contact with ordinarily accessible reality, you’re probably dealing with strawmen.
If I rationalize it to my own satisfaction and/or just don’t care, it’s indistinguishable from being good.
With the added nastiness of not actually being wrong. Except that if you ever notice yourself thinking this the gig is already up.
But surely any statement one could make about Amanda Knox is only about the Amanda Knox in this world, whether she’s a fully simulated human or something less. Perhaps only the places I actually go are fully simulated, and everywhere else is only simulated in its effects on the places I go, so that the light from distant stars are supplied without bothering to run their internal processes; in that case, the innocent Amanda Knox only exists insofar as the effects that an innocent Amanda Knox would have on my part of the world are implemented. Even so, my beliefs about the case can only be about the figure in my own world. It doesn’t matter that there could be some other world where Amanda Knox is a murderess and Hitler was a great humanitarian.