Aside: almost all knowledge fits this bill. All our best theories do. They “keep winning” against criticism. But when they lose (a criticism stands) it’s because we‘ve found something objectively better. We can never rule that out & indeed *hope* it happens eventually. Progress!https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/1058234180243312640 …
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I don’t have “reasons to believe” - (for anything...there’s our difference in epistemology again). The first premise is another way of saying “Let’s avoid hell” - indeed I agree. But we can solve moral problems, and be moral realists without needing to grant these premises.
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I'm not sure you understand what he's saying.
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Always possible. Indeed it’s the rule rather than the exception. “It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood” - Karl Popper.
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I cannot. So I've written something brief that may not rattle, but tap gently on that worldview. It's about your (excellent) focus on the dangers of dogma over the years. Here's the conclusion, but maybe some of the rest of this might be of interest too: http://www.bretthall.org/blog/questioning-foundations …pic.twitter.com/Xze2ivmCsC
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Actually, the criterion is even weaker than "believe." Show me how someone could *coherently conjecture* that either premise *might* be true.
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For a long time I could never “coherently conjecture” how some of Euclid’s axioms *might* be true. Then I learned some non-Euclidean geometry. Euclid’s axioms are very useful. As are yours. They just don’t need to be enshrined as infallible absolutes to refute moral relativism :)
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This doesn't make sense. An axiom is an assumption by definition. You suppose those are true within a given framework.
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Mathematicians never need to suppose axioms are true to solve problems. They can assert “These are the axioms, now what follows necessarily?” It’s not about proving stuff true. It’s about proving stuff. Crucial difference. I mention a little of that here: http://www.bretthall.org/blog/questioning-foundations …
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I'm confused, this was my entire point. Great blog though will be reading more as you post. For the sake of discussion, please regard the axiom of choice; axioms can have interesting consequences.
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Sam, the existence of consciousness conclusively disproves your naive
#moral point. Your#consciousness is always subjective and inaccessible to other beings. What you believe is "bad" is always a subjective judgment. Thus truth is not a quality that a moral statement can have. -
We have some access to the consciousness of other human beings. Being unable to access things “directly” doesn’t mean we’ve no access at all. The cores of stars are things we don’t have direct experience of. But we know quite well what’s going on there in terms of physics, etc.
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So, when a person says “I’m happy” & they’re smiling & really energetic & having fun you *know* (fallibly, as always) something about what their conscious subjective state is like. Consciousness may be a mystery but mysteries don’t mean there’s nothing sensible to say.
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Why is misery bad and what makes it so? What is pain? What is suffering? What are the SI units for either...?
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Misery is something like being in a seemingly perpetual state of being unable to solve your most pressing problems. There can be no “unit” for measuring such a thing & the desire for one is scientism. I distinguish suffering from mere pain here: http://www.bretthall.org/humans-and-other-animals.html …
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If there is a quantity of something, why can't it have units? If you can have more suffering or less suffering you must be able to quantify it somehow else more or less is more or less meaningless.
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Only you have the required access to your internal subjectivity. You may judge your happiness a "6" & I might judge mine "9" even if they're identical as you've higher standards than me, say. But also, in order to measure a thing we need a measuring *device*-what could that be?
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You are assuming that happiness, pain and suffering share the same units and can be measured on the same scale? I doubt this somehow.
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I doubt it too as I’m not assuming any such thing. I say: such states cannot be *measured* at all. What is the objective *ruler* for these things? It can’t be an fMRI (4 eg) as that measures ontologically objective states. What you’d require is access to ontological subjectivity.
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I suspect we can't measure it yet because we still don't know what it is. Magnetism was just a weird force that couldn't be quantified until it people studied it hard enough and long enough.
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