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https://samharris.org/the-moral-landscape-challenge/
Other essays questioned whether well-being is a concept that can be used to measure or rank moral systems, customary practices, etc., objectively. Although the authors pursued this question in a variety of ways, most did not deny that whatever might be encompassed by the concept of well-being is of some relevance when we try to evaluate or influence moral systems. They did, however, see various limits to how far we can employ the concept. Unfortunately, this brief report is not the place for me to try to settle the issues.
Others challenged the “worst possible misery for everyone” argument in Chapter 1 of The Moral Landscape. This argument relies on a claim that we must all accept that a situation of universal, unremitting, and extreme agony is bad. But if we do so, does that mean we’re committed to maximizing the aggregate (or perhaps average) well-being of all conscious creatures? What if that conflicts with other values that some of us hold dear? Even if all people who are likely to read such a book evaluated the worst possible misery for everyone as very bad indeed, could we really, even in principle, produce an objective, uncontroversial rank order of all the other possible situations that might have diverse redeeming features?
In this thread I've come into conclusion that the best case scenario for life is that conscious beings keep existing indefinitely and don't depend on particular natural resources. The next best thing is that current conscious beings are showing progress in the right direction to achieve that best case scenario.The worst case scenario is that all conscious beings go extinct, since it would make all the efforts we do now are worthless. In a universe without conscious being, the concept of goal itself become meaningless. The next worst thing is that current conscious beings are showing progress in the wrong direction which will eventually lead to that worst case scenario.
Improving well being is an effort to reduce the risk of existential threat.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 01/07/2021 17:17:06Improving well being is an effort to reduce the risk of existential threat.A minor point, but can you think of a sentence where removing the word "existential" alters the meaning? Come to think of it, risk and threat mean pretty much the same thing. So wellbeing is absence of risk? I think not.
So you are using "existential" to mean a threat to existence. That makes sense, but it isn't how most people use the word.
So, my suggestion is to replace the word objective with universal to resolve the issue. This word doesn't deny the requirement of consciousness set forth by the word morality. Universal Moral Standard is just a logical consequence from two fundamental principles, i. e. anthropic principle and cogito ergo sum.
John Horgan, journalist for the Scientific American blog and author of The End of Science, wrote, "Harris further shows his arrogance when he claims that neuroscience, his own field, is best positioned to help us achieve a universal morality. ... Neuroscience can't even tell me how I can know the big, black, hairy thing on my couch is my dog Merlin. And we're going to trust neuroscience to tell us how we should resolve debates over the morality of abortion, euthanasia and armed intervention in other nations' affairs?"
Neuroscience (or neurobiology) is the scientific study of the nervous system.[1] It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, computer science and mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons and neural circuits.The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "ultimate challenge" of the biological sciences.[7]The scope of neuroscience has broadened over time to include different approaches used to study the nervous system at different scales and the techniques used by neuroscientists have expanded enormously, from molecular and cellular studies of individual neurons to imaging of sensory, motor and cognitive tasks in the brain.
Here is another way to describe consciousness in the context of universal terminal goal. Consciousness level of a system describes how much control it has to determine its own future. In any system, we can break down this capability into 3 main parts: input, process, and output. Input parts determine how good a system can collect information about physical reality in and around it. Process parts determine how good a system can process information collected by inputs, filter it, store it, and calculate the most optimal actions aligned with its terminal goal. The output parts modify or make changes to physical reality in and around it.
Harris seems to have looking for the best case and worst case scenarios for conscious beings. In this regard, he has stepped in the right direction. Many of his critics say that he has gone too far, especially in applying science to answer philosophical questions. But my own results for best case and worst case scenarios show that instead of having gone too far, he hasn't gone far enough.
Quote from: alancalverd on 01/07/2021 23:31:42So you are using "existential" to mean a threat to existence. That makes sense, but it isn't how most people use the word.I think you know what I meant. What do you think I should have written instead to avoid misunderstandings?I know some words can mean different things in different places, and some means completely different than their roots, such as doctoring and machination.
Although it should be noted that at least at this point, the main subject of neuroscience is still restricted to biological systems. This restriction puts humans at the higher end of consciousness level spectrum.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 13/06/2021 11:07:51Other philosophers disagreed and found no route from reason to morality. David Hume thought that only emotion, not reason, could provide direction to our lives. There’s nothing contrary to reason, Hume provocatively said in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), to care more about scratching your finger than the fate of humanity. Something we should take from this debate between Plato and Hume is that it’s not at all like a parlour game on which nothing of consequence hangs. In fact, it’s hard to think of a problem that could have more consequence than one about how we’re to live our lives. Dismissing this debate as empty wordplay would be a cop-out, an evasion of an especially difficult intellectual problem. It is, moreover, far from being an isolated example. Debates about the reality of moral responsibility, the rationale for punishment or the moral status of animals raise other intellectually and morally pressing issues.Hume came into his conclusion using incomplete information. He didn't know the mechanism behind emotions. Neuroscience wasn't adequately developed yet. I'm not sure if he was aware of the anthropic principle. But I guess he knew about Descartes' cogito ergo sum. He surely didn't know about universal terminal goal, nor the universal moral standard, based on his assertion in bold. Although they are simply logical consequences of those two principles.
Other philosophers disagreed and found no route from reason to morality. David Hume thought that only emotion, not reason, could provide direction to our lives. There’s nothing contrary to reason, Hume provocatively said in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), to care more about scratching your finger than the fate of humanity. Something we should take from this debate between Plato and Hume is that it’s not at all like a parlour game on which nothing of consequence hangs. In fact, it’s hard to think of a problem that could have more consequence than one about how we’re to live our lives. Dismissing this debate as empty wordplay would be a cop-out, an evasion of an especially difficult intellectual problem. It is, moreover, far from being an isolated example. Debates about the reality of moral responsibility, the rationale for punishment or the moral status of animals raise other intellectually and morally pressing issues.
All very true, but as far as I can tell the word "existential" has no meaning.
Just like Sam Harris, someone on the internet has tried to remove the blades from Hume's Guillotine, although he hasn't seem to be successful yet.https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/05/hume-guillotine.html
Hume’s Guillotine: “One cannot derive an “ought” from an “is”. This thesis, which comes from a famous passage in Hume's Treatise [says]: there is a class of statements of fact which is logically distinct from a class of statements of value. No set of statements of fact by themselves entails any statement of value. Put in more contemporary terminology, no set of descriptive statements can entail an evaluative statement without the addition of at least one evaluative premise. To believe otherwise is to commit what has been called the naturalistic fallacy.”– John Searle, ‘How to Derive an “Ought” from an “Is”’, The Philosophical Review, 1964
Major ethicists like Immanuel Kant and indeed – to an extent – Thomas Aquinas sought to establish a rational basis for deriving moral considerations. Why rationality above other justifications? Consider: one and one is two. This is a statement that appears to hold true regardless of the state of the world, whether we’re dreaming or awake (as Descartes famously pointed out in his Meditations), whether we’re in pain, and so on. However there is an implicit assumption being made here, too: that if we do agree that one and one is two, we who agree to this statement are rational agents; that is, beings who accept the constraints and rules of logic and rationality.This appears to only beg the question: Why should anyone accept that one and one is two? (This problem so vexed the young Bertrand Russell, that he nearly mentally destroyed himself as an adult trying to establish conclusively that one and one is two.) As Sam Harris has said, how do you convince a person not interested in rationality to use rationality? As soon as you start making rational arguments, you’ve already lost.
Quote from: alancalverd on 02/07/2021 17:31:23All very true, but as far as I can tell the word "existential" has no meaning.I guess the Wikipedia author disagrees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artificial_general_intelligence#Orthogonality_thesis
Existential risk from artificial general intelligence is the hypothesis that substantial progress in artificial general intelligence (AGI) could someday result in human extinction or some other unrecoverable global catastrophe
In other words, existential means "not currently existing"!
An existential risk is any risk that has the potential to eliminate all of humanity or, at the very least, kill large swaths of the global population, leaving the survivors without sufficient means to rebuild society to current standards of living.Until relatively recently, most existential risks (and the less extreme version, known as global catastrophic risks) were natural, such as the supervolcanoes and asteroid impacts that led to mass extinctions millions of years ago. The technological advances of the last century, while responsible for great progress and achievements, have also opened us up to new existential risks.Nuclear war was the first man-made global catastrophic risk, as a global war could kill a large percentage of the human population. As more research into nuclear threats was conducted, scientists realized that the resulting nuclear winter could be even deadlier than the war itself, potentially killing most people on earth.
On the subject of AI, why would anyone build a new machine that dislikes people, can deploy lethal force in its own defence, and can commandeer all the resources it needs to keep functioning? We already have religion and politics.
Politics and religion depend on differentiating us from them. Until we get rid of both, the next generation will always see its ancestors as immoral because they made that distinction and the boundaries have been changed so that new priests and politicians can make a living.
„Religions exist because people would rather have a wrong answer than no answer at all.“ — Chuck Palahniuk, book DoomedSource: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1489111-chuck-palahniuk-religions-exist-because-people-would-rather-have-a/