Does morality/ethics have to be about valuations or preferences?
Yes. And in the fact that logic states nothing, and all propositions are equal, value statments can not be expressed.
2. Subjective senses of something feeling “right” and “wrong” (i.e., producing certain types of negative or positive physico-emotional reactions) are of course quite real for most people.
Once again, while there may be types of “yes”/“no” flags that goes off in the mind and body, they could be inifinitely more complex, grey, “contradictory” (in a poetic sense), and murky as to define them as comming to “positive”/ “negative”, “good”/“bad”, or “right”/“wrong” dichotomies, conclusions, and feelings. It may be language itself that creates a false dichotomy (not that I will claim there is or isn’t a false dichotomy). These things go beyond the scope of language, all that can be looked at is the totality of a set context (be it the entirty of a persons life, a single event, etc) that is posited in a form of shared reality. If ethics is to exist at all, it can not be spoken of, at least in the context of logic.
As Dvorak’s 9th (that is the actual content of the 9th in its entirety) can be “spoken” of in musical notation and playing an insturment, religion can be spoken of in various liturgical practices or symbology, and value statements can be spoken of in a form of poetry or perhaps a more intimite language (that is, with people who ae personally closer to you and "share"the same values): ethics, should it exist, may well have its own “language”; I am just unfamiliar with it. One thing is certain, ethics or anything else I stated can not be posited in any meaningful way in logic, science, or philosophy. That is not to say they can not be the driving force behind some/all of the actions to an individual, they just can not be spoken of with any meaning.
If you couldn’t percieve gravity, how would you know of its existence?
I wasn’t working from that definition.
If you couldn’t percieve gravity, how would you know of its existence?
Correct. Does atheism exist? Or does velocity, humans, or heat? No, not really, it is just one way of catagorizing reality as one sees it and can make use or sense of it. A heart can still be a perfect heart if it doesn’t beat. It only doesn’t “work” when you catagorize it as such, or it doesn’t follow the rule of logic that it was viewed under. There is no atomism or reductionism there is only a rearrangment of catagorization to fit ones purpose.
Heraclitus: πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει
Obviously, but the quote you were critizising basically stated this in a parahprazed way. Observer-independent simply means whether or not the actual thing exists and what it actually is does not depend on the person that observes it. For example: Whether I perceive the air around me, it either exists or it doesn’t. Whether I think it exists or not has, at least according to my logic, no influence on its existence. The same thing goes for mathematics, etc. The human concept of it can be flawed, but whether mathematics has any relation to reality or not does not depend on if I think it does. Morality however is what I think it is, whether killing is wrong in my subjective morality depends on my valuations and if I do not have any such valuations or if I don’t exist at all, then my subjective morality doesn’t exist either. It is therefore dependent on me, the observer.
If you couldn’t percieve gravity, how would you know of its existence?
Irrelevant. It exists whether I percieve it or not.
Right, but @Epicurus, just saying, “you wouldn’t assume truth is relative just because people disagree” still won’t establish the concept that preferences can be objectively better than another. We define truth as the actuality of events in the world, so it is necessarily objective. We can describe preferences subjectively, so there’s no need to make them objective as it saves an unecessary step.
We are subjective creatures in an objective space. We define truth when enough people, using testable/repeatable data come together to find what is or is not independant of the observer (at least on a macro physical level).
But I would contend that we can prove the existence of such a “thing”. We could not observe this object without, well, observing it.
What is the basis for these assertions?
I am skeptical of the distinction between your theoretical “observer-independent” reality, and morality. Could you explain why you consider this distinction valid?
So, you are saying that some phenomena exist whether or we are capable of observing them. Sounds a lot like blind faith to me, in the most literal sense.
What makes you claim that?
So, you believe that intersubjective consensus equates to objective reality. Another great example of a Humanist.
He’s a learner, cut him a little slack pls.
I am, at present, experiencing physical sensations. I can see my laptop computer in front of me and I hear the sounds in my house. I can feel the temperature of the room and even the fact that my body takes up space and has mass[1]. I can recall memories of past physical sensations that I have experienced. I also experience an ephemeral “inner dialogue” or “voice of the mind” whereby I reason through difficult problems and formulate responses to those around me. I divide my introspections into these three major areas – (1) my sensory experience of the physical world, (2) my thoughts or reasoning capacity and (3) my memories of past experiences of the physical world and past thoughts.
I think it is a mistake to differentiate between the inter-subjective and the objective because it assumes that there is some characteristic distinction between my knowledge of the world and the world itself to me. In fact, there necessarily can be no difference since the world is to me as it appears to me.
Now, there seems to be a sense in which the “real world” is what it is irrespective of how I perceive it. For example, if I look up into a blue sky I can see little dark dots in the sky that move with my eyes. Is the sky really dark in those places and do the dark spots in the sky actually move with my eyes? These spots are called floaters. They are, in fact, the result of little bubbles in the gel inside my eyeball. Floaters distort my perception of the world as it actually is. That my perceptions can be noisy or distorted implies that there is a reference to which they can be compared and found to be deficient or inaccurate.
But to jump right to the conclusion of the “noumenal” is to look past the fact that distortions or imperfections in my perception of the world still show up as inconsistencies in how I connect the dots in my own sense perceptions. To take the example of floaters, it is the fact that they move with my eyes that indicates that a naive hypothesis that the dark spots in the sky are actually a physical darkening however many miles up in the atmosphere that just happen to coincidentally move along with the muscles connected to my eyeballs is inconsistent with everything else that I know about the world from sensation, contemplation, memory and my brain’s built-in evolutionary hardwiring.
This is much different than how noise or distortion on an electrical line is defined, for example. To define noise on an electrical line, we compare two measurements of signal power, one at the source and one at the destination. What is really occurring is a comparison of a high-noise with a low-noise signal. We take the low-noise signal as the gold standard or reference signal and we take the difference in signal power between the two measurements to calculate the noise on the line.
If my senses, my thoughts and my memories are my “oscilloscope probe” connected to the real world, I only have one reference point. I cannot ascertain how noisy my senses, thoughts and memories are by comparison to some external, low-noise reference. I am trapped within my single-point-of-reference subjective experience. It is only by constructing hypotheses within this subjective experience that my brain is able to build consistent models of what it is observing and hypothesize “noise” in my “oscilloscope probe.” Floaters in my eyeballs do not actually cause a distortion of objective reality since they are also a part of objective reality (the part of it that helps construct my subjective experience of objective reality). Rather than viewing the dark spots in the blue sky as “noise”, it is simply a much more plausible hypothesis that something that moves with my eyeballs is, in fact, in my eyeballs.
To differentiate between the inter-subjective and the objective would require that somebody have a second low-noise probe with which they could subjectively experience the world more accurately. This “gold reference” would permit at least that individual to see the absolute error in his own subjective experience of the physical world. Of course, no human possesses such a capacity.
Clayton -
[1] For those with a fascination for such things, there is a word for this sensation: proprioception
I do not disagree with that. But I find it to be irrelevant. We can never truly prove anything and everything we accept as prove does rely at some point on a human logic that could be faulty and wrong. Therefore we can never really establish a “final” truth. We just try to draw logical connections between the thinks we perceive and try to make sense of them within the limited borders of the human mind.
I see no logical connection between me perceiving an object and that object existing. Therefore I see no reason to create one. It’s like children who see something scary and try to make it “non-existent” by covering their eyes with their hands. My logic tells me that this isn’t going to affect the existence of the scary thing the child thinks it saw, whether it exists or not.
I feel like we’re moving in circles. Morality, as I’ve already explained, is in my opinion no different than preferences, values, and therefore subjective. And subjective simply means that it is true, valid, for the individual/observer concerned only. I do not draw a real distinction between reality and morality in that sense, but I assert that morality is simply a part of an individual that exists within reality. Surely you would not suggest that me preferring 2 apples to 1 banana is somehow reflective of some objective, observer-independent value scale that exist independently of human thinking and is somehow valid for all things or all humans. What I’m saying is that valuations are a human concept and without humans they would not exist. The same with morality, it being a subcategory of valuations. But I have no reason to believe that for example air would not exist without humans - in fact, there is quite a lot of evidence suggesting that air has existed even before humans have.
Well said.* Basically what we have here is an abuse of standards of evidence. It’d be like if you read a peer-reviewed scientific paper that said it’s impossible for someone like you to read a scientific paper, and you believed it.
*If you mean what I think you mean by inter-subjective.
Clayton, excellent post!
Z.
Jackson, if as a part of a five-member group you observe a big black bear running furiously toward you, would you (1) join the rest by running to the safety of the house or (2) try to convince them that inter-subjective consensus has nothing to do with objective reality?
Z.
So, you are saying that some phenomena exist whether or we are capable of observing them. Sounds a lot like blind faith to me, in the most literal sense.
So, you believe that intersubjective consensus equates to objective reality. Another great example of a Humanist.
Yes, and yes. Fortunately, I am not afraid to trust my fellow humans (to a certian point). I am not afraid to be called a humanist, whatever that means… as if it is a bad thing. To think there is not a difference between reality and observation of reality is just silly. The whole of scientific progression is based on the fact that reality is not dependant (tho I wouldnt say independant) on individual observers; i.e. repeatable data and experimentation.
What makes you claim that?
Are you saying reality would not exist if there wasn’t “human” life to observe it? That seems a pretty silly notion to me.
The is a difference between our knowledge of the world and the world itself to you. It is the difference between faith in transmitted (written, oral,etc.) knowledge, and your empirical observation.
Take a look around your kitchen counter for germs, or climb the tallest vista and your neighborhood, and let me know if the Earth appears to be round. Now, isn’t there a distinct differentiation between what we know (believe), and what we see? I bet you can invite all of your family and friends with you as well to do the same. Do you think they would find something you didn’t? Likely, you would reach almost complete consensus about your observations, yet you all “know” that what you all percieve, and agree upon (your inter-subjective consensus), is a rather shoddy representation of what you “know” (believe) about the nature of our reality (the objective “Reality at Large”).
This statement is neccessarily a statement of faith. If you were unable to percieve the world in a particular state (whichever you consider to be “real”), yet still was convinced of that particular state’s existence, how is that any different than a Christian’s faith in the existence of God?
How can you know that?
If your only means of percieveing this “real” world (your senses) were, as you stated, “noisy or distorted”, how wou;d you be able to initially percieve the “real” world, in order to recognize the “noise” or “distortion”? Past personal observations, anectodal evidence of others? How can one be assured that these clearly subjective sources weren’t “noisy” or “distorted” as well? What is the protocol, what is the perfect method you deem acceptable to separate “fact” from “fiction”?
You just finished saying how terribly inconsistent our perceptions can be, yet are more than comfortable leaning upon them to prove their inconsistency!
What makes this hypothesis more plausible?
And as far as signal quality goes, you can only tell the shitty signal from the good one if you have the manual handy. If we don’t know what we are looking for, we have know frame of reference to distinguish “high noise” from “low noise”. What you decide to use as your reference is a matter of faith.
A rather paradoxical statement. How does one experience the theoretical “objective” more “accurately”? If you are unaware of the standard (in this case, the perfect observer-independent reality) how would you be able to discern that this new observation was more “accurate” (that is, a more complete representation of the observer-independent reality)?
I will agree that it is doubtful which claimaints of truth (if any) possess the truth. Although, that isn’t to say we should throw up our hands and say, “close enough” and equate intersubjective consensus with an external, observer-independent reality, and all become Humanists. They’re rather distinct, with objective reality squarely in the realm of the metaphysical.