unapologetic

Unseen wrote:
Facts are in one realm and values are in another one and never the twain shall meet because facts are value neutral

You’re right, I’m being a bit glib and disingenuous.  It’s true, they’re different realms, and we don’t treat them the same when making judgments of what to do.  We take both into account.

In a way, moral values are j…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
But it doesn’t follow from that that it can’t be intelligent or conscious in a way it that serves its interests rather than ours.

You’re right, it doesn’t.  But your statement is also consistent with the idea that it can never be human.

Unseen wrote:
You can make ethical pronouncements till the cows come home, but without some sort of absolute value(s), you have no foundation to build one on.

Yes you do, you have physical and scientific facts to build the foundation on.

Unseen wrote:
Your considerations are all human-centered. An intelligent AI needn’t be.

An AI can never be human-centred, because it’s Artificial.

State-of-the-art, which is to say, pretty dumb in some places but fair enough a lot of the time.  Yes, the AI has done a good job of summarising the field in my opinion.

_Robert_ wrote:
I would be much more interested in knowing if morality must originate with an absolute authority (who is a supernatural being) as so many apologists claim and if not, what/who is the basis for secular morality.

I think that giving a sensible explanation of secular ethics, provides a credible alternative to any story about divine…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
We don’t know what to ask or we ask the wrong questions. What’s the key difference?

AI isn’t capable of coming up with an intelligent, guided question.  It can come up with random questions, but it knows not what it is to love, or value things, or breathe the fresh air.  In other words, it’s not guided by human values, exper…[Read more]

Well, I suppose that humans asking AI the right questions will help humans to do research.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
It is not ‘conscious”.

Good point.

Unseen wrote:
I think AI is already doing research to answer questions I ask.

That’s the point I’m making.  You have to ask the questions.  AI doesn’t know what to ask.

AI is good at summarising information, apparently.  But can it do research – does it know where to look for new information?  Can it ask the right questions?  Does it know that it doesn’t know?

_Robert_ wrote:
You can do better with facts than that, Simon.

I know, but it’s so intricate, it’s hard to keep track of.

The Jewish people were looking for a state and a homeland – as are the Palestinians.  They have the homeland without the state.  It seems like the Palestinians are being used as footballs by all sides.

A middle-Eastern homeland and state for a middle-Eastern people seems like a reasonable idea in principle, for both sides.

Unseen wrote:
Clearly, that’s a roundabout nonsensical way of admitting that it’s likely the world would be a safer place. Thank you for your honesty. BTW, I’m not for abandoning Israel, but we need to be able to tell it forcibly on occasion that we aren’t backing it’s actions.

But surely it has a legitimate right to be there in the first place.

Unseen wrote:
Atheists don’t see suicide as sinful or an instance of sloth. They may not feel, in some instances, that it’s anyone else’s business.

You may be right.  I wonder what the suicide rate is among the religious, who presumably see it as a sin.

In Switzerland, Spoerri et al. used census data (3.7 million adults) and death certif…

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Would you say that there’s something in atheism that makes people want to kill themselves?  I don’t think there is, and I’ve never heard of that before.  Atheism makes people want to celebrate life and make the most of it.

Maybe suicidal people gravitate towards it as a nihilistic position.

I saw on Facebook recently that some people say that atheists are more likely to commit suicide than other groups.  I don’t know if that’s true or not.  If it is, then it could be for a number of reasons.  Atheism is a nihilistic position in that, simplistically, it’s the “worship of nothing”.  However, that’s for people who over-think thi…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
If the universe isn’t eternal, than the universe itself is wasted along with everything that was once in it.

Wasted for whom?  There’s nothing to feel a sense of waste.  You could say it’s the existential dilemma of the atheist: uncomfortable impermanence vs. the comfortable eternity of the religious.

The only sense of waste is tha…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
How to deal with it indeed.

I think the only thing to do is to live a good life: authentic and compassionate.  Then, at least it’s not wasted.  There is no cosmic significance of anything.  The point is, what’s it like for you?