notSimple

[notSimple]

Simon PayntonParticipant

@notsimple – “trying to define moral concepts eventually leads to logical inconsistency.”

– it certainly does not.  I don’t know why you say this.  Morality has a very clear and logical structure.  Some of the details, the twigs on the tree, are still to be worked out, but the tree itself is very well defined.

“The various ‘trolley car’ scenarios”

– I don’t see that the trolley car scenarios teach us very much at all that is useful.

“Ultimately there is no purely logical case for morality,”

– Hell yes there is.  Morality just uses its own logic – the logic of thriving, which has certain well-defined, consistent properties.

Not fully. Was the US Civil War moral? It gained freedom for many people. It killed many many thousands of others.  How do you weigh the killing vs the freedom? You mention circles of concern, and this is a valid view, it’s baked into our evolution… but people like Singer suggest that to be moral you must equate every person on the planet to the same level as your own child, that it would be moral to give up the life of your child to save two in Africa.

We (including myself) basically accept that causing pain, or even death is wrong. But it’s basically a postulate.  We may point out that its a matter of not doing to others what we don’t want done to us… but even that is just an axiom, we believe it, and base arguments on it, but it is not provable. The same can be said about harming animals.

Is killing a willful murderer morally OK? Can your logically defend your position or does it not go down to internal gut feelings? In some places, births of children with Down syndrome are just about zero, because the are generally aborted when the problem is detected. Some people consider this morally tolerable, others feel it’s just eugenics.

Jesus (if he actually even said those things) did not come up with a consistent moral structure. Mainly just tossed around a few nice sounding things but had no logical structure. Loving your enemies, turning the cheek, abandoning your family,  giving away your possessions (as well as your family’s future) and becoming a pauper to  enter the kingdom of the heavens don’t seem to be all that enlightened.

[notSimple]

The thing is with rights is that over time, they have been extended to more and more groups. This is part of the moral and ethical progress of the world, that Steven Pinker talks about. The right to being treated with respect is becoming more and more universal….

Ultimately human rights means to treat people with respect and dignity – this should not be a strange or alien idea.

Human rights should always be a lean basic set, but applied to all people. But expansions of the basic ‘life, liberty and pursuit of happiness’ often starts trimming freedom moving the government into places where it simply does not belong. It’s the ‘expanded’ human rights that some are pushing for that are leading to some of the push to re-implement blasphemy laws. Everyone should have freedom to live their life as they choose, but to enforce ‘respect’ and require others to approve (or pretend to) starts to trample on other peoples’ rights to conscience. Giving people a ‘right’ to income (as opposed to charitable help, which is a gift, not a right) means you need to confiscate from someone else.

No one has a ‘right’ to anyone else’s approval. Religious folks are free to disapprove of me, to consider me an evil person, and I have the same right toward them. That’s how freedom works.

[notSimple]

His point is that if you follow those qualities to their logical conclusion, it becomes absurd. Sure we can comfortably apply those stipulations to ourselves, to people one or two centuries ago, even thousands of years ago, but if you keep going back it starts becoming untenable

That is a potential factor with much, if not all, of our concept of morality and justice. The various ‘trolley car’ scenarios demonstrate that there is a lot of areas where trying to define moral concepts eventually leads to logical inconsistency. Bringing ‘god’ into the picture doesn’t help, because he can’t seem to make up his own mind about much of this, but, like a politician, he generally sides with the views of whichever group he is talking to.

Ultimately there is no purely logical case for morality, but nonetheless it is deeply part of our set of complex social instincts. As an allegory, consider your spam filter on email. Each time you get a spam, you can create a rule to block future instances, but as the number of rules grows, some directly contradict one another, some filter out stuff that they shouldn’t and some spam still gets through. In our evolution, certain social behaviors contributed to survival, and these were reinforced through selection. But that’s absolutely no guarantee that those behavioral rules are logical or consistent.

[notSimple]

Belle Rose wrote:

In any event, I don’t believe this will lead to a world war – I do think it’s possible that we have a contained war, but China has already stated that that if North Korea initiate aggression against the USA, and the USA retaliates, they will remain neutral.

What no one sees is that Russia is poised to attack as well. That is how this is going to become a world war. They are already playing with us right under our noses. Trump has played right into the hands of every foreign power that wants to take us out and burnt bridges with our ally’s….In a way that is pretty irreversible as long as he is in power.

–Actually you miss the point. Being an effective negotiator, like being a good poker player, has nothing to do with whether you’re a ‘good guy’ or not. It has to do with whether you can win.  There are many many thousands of people who tried to play that game and failed. And no one said anything about ‘self made’ (which seems to be an obsessive target of the Dems  who feel it shuts down the conversation).

Obama, and Bush W were ineffective negotiators, losing far too much to opponents, and leaving serious problems unsettled.

Per the Russia comment, they do not appear to be that interested in this issue. They have their own economic problems, their military infrastructure is pretty far behind on upkeep and they have little incentive to involve military action short of actual defense.

BTW the term ‘psychopath’, despite the craziness with which it is thrown around by people who probably don’t even know any CEOs, has very specific definitions, and most psychopaths don’t tend to succeed in interactions with others for too long.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 8 months ago by notSimple.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 8 months ago by notSimple.

[notSimple]

One may not like Trump’s policies, but one does not make billions in international real estate by being a poor negotiator.

He needed to provide a way for China to save face, and it looks like China (who is not happy about a nuclear NK) is willing to play along and step aside

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/china-warns-north-korea-youre-on-your-own-if-you-go-after-the-us/2017/08/11/a01a4396-7e68-11e7-9026-4a0a64977c92_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_chinankorea-511am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.89a0a286fbce

Incidently, after Trump’s first remarks, NK stopped using the term nuclear in its threats to strike. One suspects this is not accidental.

[notSimple]

Negotiations are not about truth, they’re about who will back down.

[notSimple]

Strega

I basically agree.  The groundwork for this crisis was laid by the past 3 presidents who figured that by playing nice, he would come on board.

Obama made big mistake in Syria, by threatening Assad with serious consequences for using poison gas. He used it and nothing happened. Even though the ‘miniature’ nuke is just being confirmed now, apparently it was known by US intelligence back in 2013.  The administration denied it then, apparently because to admit it would have required strong action, which they didn’t want to do. So here we are 4 years later, with NK having better technology, and being supported partly by Iran who got out from under the restrictions.

Quite a mess.

[notSimple]

Perhaps only in mathematics can one construct a pure logical argument. Even that involves postulates; and as Godel proved, any sufficiently expressive grammar (logical structure) must by necessity have contradictions.

Most everything else in the world is not nearly so clear cut. You can apply some level of logic, but inevitably you’re starting with missing information, contradictory information, wrong information (and things like the famous ‘things we know, things we don’t know, and things we don’t know that we don’t know). Many situations as well involve weighing one set of outcomes against another, or one set of probable ‘truths’ against another… with the result being that often reasonably logical, intelligent people can come to rather different conclusions.

 

[notSimple]

This sort of touches on the periodic discussions over at biologist Jerry Coyne’s blog (whyevolutionistrue) about whether we are fully deterministic or not (Jerry advocates for determinism). I’m comp sci, but not in the AI field. Nonetheless, I am still unconvinced that we are truly approaching artificial intelligence, instead we’re getting pretty good simulated intelligence. Nor, will we ever get true artificial intelligence until we jump outside the Turing model of computation. Using IBM’s Watson as an example, it has access to huge amounts of data, and successfully became a Jeopardy champ, but it still understands nothing. There is not spark of comprehension, just highly efficient pattern matching.

Which comes back to Coyne’s discussions. With consciousness not understood, there is a huge bit of our knowledge missing, too much missing to currently confidently answer the free will question.

[notSimple]

Friendships change for a variety of reasons, changing to religion or atheism sometimes does it, changes in life style, interests, etc also does it.

It’s not a catastrophe, it’s just part of human nature. Humans are dynamic creatures, constantly changing.

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