Maybe he does have terrible politics, I haven't followed any of that, just the science conversations.
If anyone knew how to measure cognition that would be a huge breakthrough. You're straight up wanting answers to how complex systems work, but before that can happen the tools have to catch up to the subject. At the very lower limit the tools need the same amount of computation and data as the system you want to model.
If my morality is supposed to be dictated by this, I actually want it to be a morality that makes any degree of sense.
Ultimately what I find chilling about Sam Harris' supposed morality is that other people will be left to dictate what is moral. Ultimately, and I know I get this shit allot for my opposition to it, Harris' The Moral Landscape ends with it just being an endorsement of Experts telling us what we aught to want, think and behave. Who decides what is better off? Who is making these decisions and how they are measured is completely IMHO impossible to claim in some empirical scientific way. His morality seems more to just be an endorsement of his politics, and a rationalization for it.
On MMO-C we learn that Anti-Fascism is locking arms with corporations, the State Department and agreeing with the CIA, But opposing the CIA and corporate America, and thinking Jews have a right to buy land and can expect tenants to pay rent THAT is ultra-Fash Nazism. Bellingcat is an MI6/CIA cut out. Clyburn Truther.
Isn't Nietzsche a Nihilist instead of Atheist?
We don't need a perfect definition of Well-being for every decision.
Even an incomplete definition of Well-being would indicate that some alternatives are better and some are worse - even if we cannot compare all alternatives (in economic terms Pareto had one such idea a long time ago - but we can go further).
Okay, we need A definition then, which Sam Harris never bothered to articulate beyond vague allusions to the low hanging fruit of generally obvious and very simple moral dilemma problems.
Its junk beyond the most simplistic of situations, and even the examples he gave are based on a lot of assumptions.
Ultimately what I'd ask is what does The Moral Landscape do with the Trolley Problem as one glaringly complex moral and ethical problem. Either Sam Harris isn't offering anything terribly original (I.E. Consequentialism and Utilitarianism) or he really bungled articulating it in the Moral Landscape.
On MMO-C we learn that Anti-Fascism is locking arms with corporations, the State Department and agreeing with the CIA, But opposing the CIA and corporate America, and thinking Jews have a right to buy land and can expect tenants to pay rent THAT is ultra-Fash Nazism. Bellingcat is an MI6/CIA cut out. Clyburn Truther.
Wait, is Sam Harris taught as a philosopher in school now? :s
To me Sam Harris is logical, rational and practical to a degree that most people are not. Everyone who thinks he is racist, bigoted etc I find to be intellectually lazy or incapable/unwilling to understand him.
I like Sam Harris a lot, but the idea of moral absolutes is ridiculous. Morality is subjective and up the individual. We simply negotiate those positions with each other to exist with one another. Sam asserts there's an objective, factual morality we can arrive at that all humans would agree on.
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Nihilist but it lead him to the concept of the overman/superman. Where each individual is responsible for their own meaning. (I personally find this more sophisticated than Sam Harris's objective morality.)
The person who I most agree with is Jordan Peterson. Morality is a vague ideal we all sort of agree on, but it is still up to the individual. He talks about ancient dominance hierarchies that have been around for hundreds of millions of years that have shaped our morality. But it's a process of Darwinism that lets different moralities win out over others perpetually.
It's why highly social animals have recognizable patterns of behavior that we often relate to our own morality (wolf packs, taking care of young, etc, protecting herd).
This leads me to believe morality will always be a squishy thing that has been around for so long we won't really be able to truly specify or wrap our heads around it. Whereas I think people like Sam think morality are only problems that only surface or are relevant to intelligent species (of our intelligence), but that's simply not true.
Last edited by ro9ue; 2017-06-07 at 07:57 PM.
Personaly I better recognize in Nietzsche.
Last edited by mmocff6a2f8211; 2017-08-02 at 09:31 AM.