Values vary plenty between humans, too. Yudkowsky might need “human value” to be a coherent entity for his theories to work, but that isn’t evidence that human value is in fact coherent. And, because values vary, moral systems vary. You don’t have to go to another planet to see multiple tokens of the type “morality”.
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Naturalistic libertarians usually appeal to mixtures of determinism and indeterminism, occurring in different parts of the brain or at different stages in the decision making process.
That then runs into Bible Code problems: anything maps to anything under a sufficent complex and arbitrary interpretation. But who’s doing the interpretation?
If there is anything that anyone should in fact do, then I would say that meets the standards of “realism.”
You should in fact pay your taxes. Which is to say that if a socially defined obligation is enough, then realism is true. But that might be setting the bar too low.
But from the perspective of a hypothetical superintelligent spider living on Mars, donating to projects that effectively help humans is utterly pointless.
OK. But does lack of universality imply lack of objectivity, or lack of realism?
Minimally, an objective truth is not a subjective truth, that is to say, it is not mind-dependent. Lack of mind dependence does not imply that objective truth needs to be the same everywhere, which is to say it does not imply universalism. I like to use the analogy of big G and little g in physics. Big G is a universal constant, little g is the local acceleration due to gravity, and will vary from planet to planet (and, in a fine-grained way, at different points on the earths surface). But little g is perfectly objective, for all its lack of universality.
I understand “moral realism” as a claim that there is a sequence of clever words that would convince the superintelligent spider that reducing human suffering is a good thing.
So it implies lack of realism? Assuming you set the bar for realism rather high. But lack of realism in that sense does not imply subjectivism or error theory.
I’ve read it.
Then you have two problems. One of the is that the warm fuzzy feeling definition of God is a perfectly good grounding. The other is that large tracts of science and maths can’t be grounded in sensation. How do you ground imaginary numbers or infinity or the interior of an event horizon?
I wouldn’t expect lesswrongians to be keen on Platonic style moral realism, where moral facts correspond to supernatural objects, but there are other classes of morally realistic theories’ where moral facts depend on analytical truths or natural states of affairs. Lesswrongians are definitely keen utilitarianism, where ethical claims depend on natural facts about preferences, and is therefore, arguably, a naturalistic form of moral realism.
The is-ought gap remains a problem which I touch on below.
But nearly all standard arguments against moral realism also function as arguments against “normative realism”
If normative realism is just the claim that there are meaningful and true statements about what you should do if you want to achieve some X, then they are abundant.. things like game theory and engineering, actually any kind of methodology, have plenty of them.
What are the problems with normative realism about moral claims, then?Maybe that they are categorical, lacking an “if you want to do X” condition.
Any other Brightonians?
That would depend on the meaning of “grounding”.
How can groundings be correct or incorrect?
To put it another way, “grounding” is pretty ambiguous between defining a term and justifying the existence of an entity.
Are you sure? You seem to believe in materialism, without being able to give proper explanations of space, time, matter and energy.
So whats superior about your epistemology?
The hope is that they’ll hit on something big like self-driving car technology that fundamentally improves Uber’s marginal profit.
Or the old fashioned thing where you kill off competition and then raise prices.
Ex. 8: I believe in a soul because I have a really strong gut feeling.
OTOH, thinking without any intuitions or assumptions at all remains an unsolved problem.
Naively defining space as the gaps between stuff produces as much clarity and conviction as defining god as a warm fuzzy feeling. Which could conceivably go missing.
If its at all possible for consciousness to transfer between worlds
I suppose it’s not.
Then you dont need the lengthy detour about measure.
Physics doens’t say how consciousness works.
It exists in brains, brains are made of atoms, and physics has a story or two about the atoms
And consciousness isn’t a common or hard higher level phenomenon. Again, the point of reductionism is to understand the higher level phenomena in terms of Lower level activity, not just to notice that big things are made of little things.
A believer in God is an easy target. Can you find a deep belief in something that you are holding and go through the same steps you outlined above for Stephanie?
It turns out to be hard to be clear and specific about the basic concepts of materialism, like time, space, matter and energy.
Okay but I don’t even know where to begin imagining what a lack of objective reality looks like
I would think it is like dreaming.. an individual having experiences that aren’t shared with or comparable to anyone else’s.
Doesn’t look like it.