Emotivism: The argument from self-consistency

I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to an empty abstraction. Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?

The problem with some nihilisms, especially epistemological nihilism, is a kind of inconsistency. This kind of inconsistency is not logical inconsistency, but a kind of "personal inconsistency".

Let's see one example: epistemological nihilism.

Epistemological nihilism states that there is no way to know truths. There are various kinds of epistemological nihilism:

• Ontological: truths don't exist;
• Skeptical: there are no methods for us to know the truth;
• Meta skeptical: there are, but we can't know which methods actually work;

The common rejection is this: If you believe in epistemological nihilism, then you believe in something, but that's not justifiable, by epistemological nihilism.

How to write continental philosophy

Continental philosophy (mostly French, German) have a very distinct taste and structure. I am writing this after getting tired of one continental philosophy book (the Topology of Violence) that has an interesting idea but screws it up by the continental philosophy style.

The Topology of Violence proposes that there are three stages of violence in human society:

1. Violence by negativity (taking something away from others), used for making self better. This is the violence in stateless societies. In this aspect, violence is like experience point in games, you get it by inflicting violence, and lose it by being violated. The boss is whoever happens to have the most exp.
2. Violence by negativity, used for preventing violence. This is the "crime and punishment" violence of a lawful state.
3. Violence by positivity. This is "too much information, too much to do, never good enough" kind of violence in modern society.

This good idea was expanded by 100 pages of boring continental philosophy. I got so tired of it, I'll now describe how to make continental philosophy.

Lookism, racism, ageism, and more

Lookism: the problem of beauty

Start with Ted Chiang's observation on beauty

Psychologists once conducted an experiment where they repeatedly left a fake college application in an airport, supposedly forgotten by a traveler. The answers on the application were always the same, but each time they included a different photo of the fictitious applicant. It turned out people were more likely to mail in the application if the applicant was attractive. This is perhaps not surprising, but it illustrates just how thoroughly we're influenced by appearances; we favor attractive people even in a situation where we'll never meet them. 

Yet any discussion of beauty's advantages is usually accompanied by a mention of the burden of beauty. I don't doubt that beauty has its drawbacks, but so does everything else. Why do people seem more sympathetic to the idea of burdensome beauty than to, say, the idea of burdensome wealth? It's because beauty is working its magic again: even in a discussion of its drawbacks, beauty is providing its possessors with an advantage.

The final solution

It is often said that the universe does not care.

But it does: try breaking quantum mechanics. You will fail. The universe cares about quantum mechanics.

We care too much, about the wrong things, but we are getting better.

The evolution of morality is effectively a convergent dance, with what we care about converging towards what the universe cares about. With accelerating abstraction, we encode what we care into what the universe cares.

• The universe cares a lot about obstructing prime factorization attempts, so we encode trust into the RSA crypt.
• The universe cares a lot about numerical consistency, so we encoded fairness into certain processes of interpreting and using statistical data.
• The universe cares a lot about thermodynamics, so we encoded parts of our life-preserving morality into rules on energy use and greenhouse gas emission, forced by the looming climate change.

There are hints of this kind of moral development in one person's life. As a person develops, they adjust their expectations to reality, including their morality. No longer do they demand the impossible, such as for friendships to last forever, or for childhood to last forever, or to blame others for things they could not have foreseen, or to demand "unreasonable" effort from others. In short, they learn to be reasonable. How "unreasonable" is unreasonable, of course, is finely calibrated to reality, and changes from time to time, with new information technologies, heat engines, social conventions, and so on, changing the boundary of the "reasonable". 

They pretend that it's consistent with previous moralities. That in developing such a morality so finely attuned to reality, they were merely remembering what morality they once saw in a higher plane of existence (like Plato claims). Or perhaps they claim that the seed of morality has been buried when they were just starting to think, and they were simply growing out the full branches and leaves of the tree of morality.

However, this explanation is a fabrication. There is no Platonic plane of existence, and there is no seed of morality. Instead, morality is like water, taking the shape of its container, which is (material, social, informational) reality.

Now imagine scaling this up to moral development in humanity's history.

Complex encodings develop to close the gap between our hopes and the world. From our dreaming brains, tentacles of thought extend out, bifurcating, reweaving, gripping reality by a thousand little physical contacts.

The perfection of moral encoding transforms morality into equivalent natural laws. At this perfect point, we would finally stop striving to be moral -- we would have no choice but be moral, when morality (after encoding) becomes a subset of physics.

The end point of moral development, then, is the end of moral striving. Moral thoughts and actions become compulsory, automatic, and the world is beautiful just the way it runs.

The ghost of morality in science

Simply put, morality is a ghost that doesn't like to be scienced, and science has been trying its best to make morality go away.

The basic point from the scientific viewpoint on morality is that it does not do anything. Morality by its definition resists scientific explanation. If there's an explanation to why we do things morally, it becomes imaginable that we do something else morally, or not, and either way, "morality" can be seen as a ghost that doesn't do anything.

Think of the marital morality of the praying mantis. Is it moral, or not, for the female mantis to eat the male mantis after marriage? It is in their nature, with a deep reason. Praying mantis evolved to have this kind of strange and cruel (viewed by a human) morality. If they evolved in some other way, they would have a different morality.

"What is the price of friendship?" and other evil questions from a rational monster

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

― Oscar Wilde

We follow the theory of Philip E. Tetlock, who has studied several related topics: forecasting future events (as detailed in a book Superforecasting (2015)), counterfactual history ("What if...?"), and some "taboo thoughts" that despite being rational, often provokes "moral outrage" (precise definition given later).

These topics are related, as we will see later. But first: What's the price of an average human life?

Answer: In America, between 1 million to 10 million.

Now, this is perfectly reasonable, as a Fermi estimate quickly shows: An average American works 50 years, with yearly salary 30000 dollars. So in full that gives 1.5 million dollars. That's a lower bound, considering that it's just cash salary and doesn't include all the other non-salary productive work, like friendship, volunteering, and writing free blog posts (like this one lol). But the order of magnitude is very much right.

Okay, if that's right, then isn't it wrong to say "A life is priceless?"

Yes. But don't say it out loud, else you get the dreaded moral outrage.

Survey of moral realism and irrealism

Note: philosophers use "ethics" and "morality" as the same word.

The moral realism vs irrealism contrast is the most important contrast in metaethics, the study about what ethics is, such as whether morality is objective, subjective, emotion-based, rationality-based, changeable over time, etc.

Realism says morality is real in some sense, while irrealism says it isn't.

Infinity

For an example of such a contrast, we can consider the positions on infinity in mathematics. Realism would simply say that infinity exists, is an actual mathematical object, and there's a symbol of it, ω. Irrealism would claim that ω is just a convenient fiction, and merely stands for the endlessness of natural numbers.

There are very fine-grained notions of realism vs irrealism in the study of infinity, too, used by expert set theorists. Most set theorists consider the first few infinities unproblematic, but as they climb up the ladder of infinities, they encounter more and more abstract infinities. They often draw a line somewhere and proclaim infinities beneath some line real and above unreal.

Susan Blackmore's Theory of the Self

Susan Blackmore is a scientist who is most famous for studying memes, with the book The Meme Machine (2000). It's a bit outdated at this point though. She's also a skeptic in debunking some pseudoscience.

I'll start with two videos:

Memes and Tremes

Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology -- and invents ways to keep itself alive

Living Without Free Will

When I say that consciousness is an illusion, I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion.

Philosophical sketch: Reducing a person to a will, with implications on morality

The Japanese religion of Shinto (神道) believes in Kegare (汚れ), meaning a religious state of pollution. It can be caused by many kinds of things, but usually those that are too... "bodily". Things like childbirth, touching dead bodies, etc.

In the West we have the saying that 'cleanliness is next to godliness' but the Japanese conception may be closer to 'cleanliness is not distinct from godliness'. ---- Brandon Toropov and Luke Buckles O.P.

As an example of how serious it is, after the Battle of Miyajima, which took place on a sacred island, the victorious army removed all the corpses, and then cleaned the entire battlefield of blood, to the point that buildings were scrubbed, and blood-soaked soil was removed from the island.