zurew

I gave you some of those reasons in my previous posts (in the other thread). But I can give more if needed. But I would love to see what is the response to those objections and I would love to see whats the argument for realism.

There can be many different possible reasons. I think one reason could be that spiritual people want to differentiate themselves from religious people and one way to do that is to just negate some of the views religious people take on certain things. One other reason could be thinking through all possible options and actually arriving on their own that moral realism is implasuible or that it is false - but I personally take it that this is much less likely to be the case (just based on the fact , that most spiritual people are typically not well educated about the literature on morality). One other reason could be that they picked up antirealist moral intuitions from their culture and from their parents.

To be fair to you, there are versions of moral realism where moral claims can be reduced down to descriptive claims (like certain descriptive facts about the world) - I just take it that 1) those kinds of views are miselading, because I personally wouldn't even categorize them as moral views. 2) Since they can be reduced down to descriptive claims, they essentially lack action-guiding. There are other types of moral realist views where those normative claims are irreducible. There the issue that I have is that those views are mostly unintelligible to me and those views just lack persuasion. Like why would you ever care about a random irreducible moral claim just based on the fact that it is objectively true? Like imagine there would be an objectively true irreducible moral claim "You ought to walk backwards when you go to work" - like why would you ever abide by that? and if those objectively true irreducible moral claims are such that are already aligned with your subjective preferences, then sure you will abide by them, but not because they are objectively true, but because they are aligned with things you subjectively care about.

You can cash out "ought" statements by relating them to subjective preferences and desires and intuitions. Like the statement "You ought to do X" can be cashed out as "I have the preference of you doing X or I want you to do X" Some of them can also be cashed out as descriptive goal related statements about reality like "If you want to achieve goal x then you ough to do y" - where "ought" just describes a constitutive necessity, namely that y is something that is necessary to achieve X , but there isn't anything in there that moral antirealists couldnt agree with. The other thing is that when Leo makes statements about Love and such is that those statements are not moral realist claims, those are just claims about metaphysics - about the nature of reality. They are descriptive claims, not normative claims.

How is that incompatible with antirealism?

1) Why would you need to prescribe any universal moral claim? 2) Why would any individual be motivated by what you prescribe?

Its the thesis that there are moral facts about whats right or wrong independent from stances (standards, intuitions,goals, preferences, desires) But again, there is no special entailment by moral realism being false. Even the video that you linked there , that video describes a highly specific moral-antirealist view, where you need to tolerate and be okay with the views other cultures have, but thats not entailed under all antirealist views. There is no line from "there are no moral facts that are stance independently true" to "you need to be okay and you need to tolerate whatever others want to do or whatever views they have".

I think you have a different idea what moral realism means compared to the philosophers who endorse the view. Being highly altruistic and dying for others (if you wanted to bring up Jesus dying on the cross) are all compatible with moral anti-realism. Moral antirealists can also agree with you that enlightened people usually are highly altruistic people and they probably have a natural impulsive to love and help others - all of that is compatible with moral antirealism being true.

What do you think is precisely at stake if moral realism is false?

I didnt think of simple heruistics, I was thinking more about general herustics. This is similar to all issues, in that you can always go one level of abstraction higher, check what set of issues you need to deal with each and every time a tradeoff discussion comes up and somewhat formalize and create a general template for it. The move isn't to turn one's brain off from then on and to not use any fluid thinking anymore, the move is to get a deeper and more systemic understanding of tradeoff issues and then given that deeper understanding , check whether the solutions (that worked in other trade-off cases) could be applied to this specific trade-off case as well. For instance, a general herustic could be is to think through not just first order but second order consequences each and every case a trade-off discussion comes up. (Because you might have a realization after studying these issues in a systemic way, that the cost of delay usually turns out to be the best when second order thinking is applied and not when first or third or third+ order thinking is applied)

The purpose of the example wasnt to show that it is right, the purpose of it was to question and to challenge how and when slipperly slope and caution is applied. The question is when a new thing is proposed like "x should be implemented" what set of heruistics you go through so that you can say "X can actually be implemented" rather than delaying x and saying "there is more work and thinking needs to be done before X is implemented". Im asking what herustics you use (if any) when you think about these things, where the cost of delaying is calculated and not ignored.

Saying to question things to death is completely empty, when there is either no satisfying answer is given when one is challenged or the question is just simply dodged. If we were to go through statistically what kind of responses Leo gives when his fundamental claims are challenged , then my guess would be that 90%+ of those responses involves saying things like "I am the most awake person and you dont understand what I understand and I wont bend over backwards to respond to your pathetic misunderstandings and your closed-mindedness" You mistake the empty saying of "question things, and verify things for yourself", with not being dogmatic, but uttering that statement is compatible with him and actualized.org being dogmatic. If it were the case that Leo wouldn't be dogmatic, then he wouldnt navigate fundamental disagreements the way he does. Namely, he wouldn't automatically just assume (in literally all cases) that his interlocutor is wrong and that his interlocutor is the one who needs to do more verification and more work and more thinking and more spiritual work, but he would be open to the possibility that he fucked up and he is fundamentally wrong. The other thing that shows cultishness, is that no suckup mods and no hardcore Leo followers would even assign 10% credibility to alien awakening and such claims, if they would be introduced by someone other than Leo. The issue is not that his hardcore followers are open to the possibility that such an awakening is possible , it is that given the fact that Leo introduced it to be the case, there is no state of affairs where they would start to entertain the possibility that such a thing is false or implausible and that Leo is fundamentally wrong. Like what divine state of affairs would need to happen, so that they will say something like "Even though I cant be 100% certain on this, I still take Leo's claim about alien awakening to be incredibly implausible and I think he is fundamentally wrong" rather than forever repeating the cultish "I need to do more spiritual work to realize what Leo realized" and then never lowering their credence in his claim (not even by 0.00001%). We also know that no Leo suckup here would ever accept the Leo disagreement protocol used by someone who isnt Leo. Like imagine having multiple drug trips that goes against one of the fundamental claims of Leo and then telling to Leo and to his suckups (after recognizing that there is a fundamental disagreement) that "Well ,well ,well, you guys need to verify what I said for yourselves and you guys need to question things deeper". Do you think the response there from Leo and from his suckups would be "Yeah, I need to rethink the insights from my trips because there is an epistemic issue here that I need to resolve" or it would be "that guy is 100% wrong, he is the one who needs to do more verifying and more questioning, what a pathetic freak, this guy thinks he understands reality better than Leo lol". Which response is more plausible in that a situation? The answer to that question tells you how cultish his suckups are and how dogmatic Leo is. My question for you would be - what behavior you can point to that is done by Leo and by his suckups that showes that they dont use platitudes like "verify it for yourself" and "be more open minded" mainly as a defense mechanism to forever delay changing their own views on things (when they are fundamentally challenged).

One easy way to deal with the worry you bring up is to leave unpaid and by that non-regulated motherhood open. If you want to be paid by the government you need to deal with x set of regulations, but you are free to choose the kind of motherhood where those restrictions dont apply to you, its just that in that case you dont get paid for it. If you just want to bring up a general heruistic, where we are catious about what new thing we implement, then I can agree with that . On the other hand, If you want to make a more broad point that it is expected that certain issues will come from blurrying the lines - then I would need to see how that would bring a novel new set of problems that isn't already present to the private-public life issue. I view this similarly to the freespeech absolutist arguments, where a slippery slope worry is brought up like "Well, if we start to regulate speech in any kind of way, then that regulation might be misused to the point where people will be just randomly banned from everywhere and their ability to speak will be taken away forever. Whats stopping instituitions and people from the misuse of power?" The slippery slope needs to be motivated by some kind of supporting argument for it to be somewhat expected. Like I imagine you wouldnt buy into a free speech absolutist slippery slope argument like "Look, childporn cant be banned because that restriction can be misused in malicious ways, where people can use your computer to upload CP and by that they can get you arrested or they can just maliciously miscategorize the content that you upload as CP when it is 100% not CP". It is true, that by the move of introducing restrictions we also introduce new possible misuses of power, but the thing that is interesting is: given the moral character of people and given the judicial system and given the incentive structures - how easy, and how expected it is that people will misuse their powers and how much damage you need to deal with if you dont implement the restriction.

Its insane that some people cant recognize and track the fact that what you are saying isn't always sensitive to empirical critcism (in this case to the content of the given awakening) because its a definitional issue. Its like saying "I discovered in my new awakening that there are married bachelors" - for you to recognize that that statement is incoherent, you dont need to know the content or the profoundness of said awakening. It always comes back to the same shit - its either the case that he is contradicting himself and he is conceptually confused regardless how profound the awakening was or it is the case that he is using the terms differently in which case his statement means something completely different and he is talking about something related to Maya.

If thats what you mean by theory of everything then we already have a bunch of them. There are many candidate possible explanations for the big-bang. By many physicists the big-bang isn't even taken to be the start of existence or even the start of the universe, its taken to be the universe expanding from an extremely hot, dense state.

Good quality debate but TK made some mistakes and Destiny wasn't really prepared to challenge things because he never seriously engaged with philosophy. First you can just reject one of the main premise of TK's argument that there is a shared set of moral intuitions/seemings across all people. This is an empirical question that isn't substantiated and even if it would be, his claim relies not just on current times, but in past times as well (and I dont see why we should think that people in the past had a shared disagreement about torturing people for fun for instance). He also confused meta-ethics with normative ethics and he confused intersubjective with objective. Moral antirealists can have the normative ethics position that torturing kids for fun is bad without them needing to have any moral realist meta ethical position. And people having a shared set of moral intuitions is consistent with moral antirealism. When it comes to his evolution argument 1) People already accept that evolution is true, so they can just use evolution to explain why people have shared moral intuitions (if they have, again this wasnt substanstiated by TK) without them needing to affirm any extra propositions that they dont already believe in. So its not like they are forced to inflate their worldview by affirming that evolution is true. 2) TK didnt make any supporting argument and he didnt substantiate how it follows from evolution being optimized for survival that people dont have truth tracking cognition at all or how they dont have reliably truth tracking cognition. He needs to show whats the actual inconsistency in saying that evolution selects for moral intuitions that are good for survival and evolution also didnt select against people having reliably truth tracking cognition. 3) Even in the context where we go with the position that evolution does completely undermine truth-tracking cognition, even in that context the conclusion isn't that evolution is false, and isn't that evolution didnt select for moral intuitions that are optimized for survival; The conclusion is that if evolution is true, then we are epistemically undermined, but that is consistent with evolution being true. Even in this case his argument would be a pragmatic argument at best that would only show how accepting evolution leads you to not being able to justify your worldview (But again, not being able to justify your worldview isn't the same as your worldview being false). He used the abductive move where he searched for the best explanation for accounting for a shared set of moral intuitions. The issue there is that when it comes to abductive reasoning, you gonna have different theoretic virtues that you will look for and by him affirming that there is a moral structure out in the world, he needs to inflate his ontology by adding extra entities that moral anti-realists dont need to affirm to account for the same facts. TK also begged the question against dialetheists. Im not even sure if he knows that there are philosophers who take the stance that there are true contradictions. This is unfortunately typical of scholastics, that they for some reason think that classical logic is above everything else and they think that there havent been any progress made in the discovery/creation of new logics since Aquinas. TK also dodged the question about the God moral question (implying that the scenario is unintelligible when thats clearly not the case). He couldn't even entertain that hypothetical even though in the Bible you can actually find at least one instance where God wants people to do something that would go completely against most modern people's moral seemings and intuitions. I am referring to God ordering the Israelites to genocide the canaanites (not just adults, but their children and their animals as well).

He did say a different thing. The answer to my original question: "Is it the case that things can exist outside of your consciousness?" Wasnt a "no", it was a conditional answer. Your answer isn't responding to that question you are only answering a question that I didnt explicitly ask "is it the case that you can imagine that things can be outside of your consciousness" - but thats substanstially different from the claim that things actually exist outside of your consciousness.

He said things like "nothing exists outside of your consciousness" in the past, so we are clearing up where he is at and what he means by certain statements.

Let me rephrase it then. Under your view - the inside-outside consciousness distinction is irrelevant, what you imagine is only whats relevant when it comes to things existing. Going with that - in the context of the infinity of Gods video, those Gods only exist in so far as you imagine them to exist and none of them have a seperate existence from what you imagine.

The implication there being that you can imagine things outside of your consciousness.

If you actually cared about people not misinterpreting you, then it would be very easy for you to clear up the confusion: Is it the case that things can exist outside of your consciousness or not or in other words specifically related to the video are there Gods that can exist without you imagining them? If the answer is no, then that whole thing in that infinity of Gods video was very misleading in how you framed it and how you walked people through your awakening; if the answer is yes, then the video has more gravity and less misleading; if the answer is "I dont know,because im epistemically limited to answer that qeustion, how would I know?" then that leaves the question open which is fine, but at least we know what your actual stance is on the issue without you being ambigous.

Lol. You do understand right that you can find more overall criticism of the field of science and philosophy and rationality on the site I linked than what Leo managed to produce in his entire life. There is this unjustified myth in your head that you just picked up from Leo and never ever questioned and just taken for granted that there is this big consensus among philosophers across positions on metaphysics, science, rationality, epistemology etc.

Whats the response to the questions I asked you ? You are using predicates in your question, that are vague and thats not how you compare theses in metaphysics and epistemology. Here is one thing I can tell you most academics wouldnt do - they wouldnt give internally incoherent statements like what Leo gave in his infinity of Gods video. Yes a lot of it is responses to responses which is good, because that can give depth to the issues and that can force the authors to defend underyling assumptions and to produce supporting arguments to the given premises. Now I dont think that the circle jerk issue is any bigger than whats happening here on this forum. For you to be able to actually respond to the given argument you need to understand what the premises mean in the argument and what kind of inference is used. You need a shared vocabulary for that and you need to be trained to understand how arguments work. People on this forum would rather not study technical words and would rather pretend that a shared terminology automatically means a shared understanding , when thats clearly not the case. This forum includes a lot of ideologically driven groupthink trashing scientist and academics without any underlying substantive understanding of the views academics are holding and assuming that every scientist and philosopher is just a new atheist rationalist.

The bar isn't to be more informed than me (although I have good reason to think that when it comes to certain fields he lacks very basic level understanding) ,but in any case the bar is to be better compared to all academics combined in a given field, because thats what Leo set his bar at. Now tell me how many works do you think Leo is familiar with from here, how many he could read and understand to the point where he could tell you in his own words what the given paper is about and then tell me why do you think that he is anywhere near remotely trained in the field and justified in giving any opinion about what level of understanding academics have related to these subfields? Philosophy of Mind (113,100) Epistemology (58,300) Metaphilosophy (13,045) Metaphysics (65,333) Philosophy of Religion (85,645) Science, Logic, and Mathematics (464,142) https://philpapers.org/ Good luck with the above.

One of the biggest weakness of actualized.org goes back to the point about language and a lack of shared precise vocabulary and the lack of falsifiability ( and here im only talking about weak falsification, where the only criteria is that there can be evidence against your view, not necessarily that your view can be shown to be false). 1) When you have a bunch of vague undefined or ill-defined terms, sure you can dodge most criticisms that comes in your way because you can claim that they miss the target. However, even good faith and good critiques will almost necessarily miss and your work cant benefit from the antifragility that comes from receiving good faith, good quality critiques from multiple different perspectives and angles, because people dont know what and where the target actually is. This is why most academic arguments are much easier to undermine, because given how the arguments are structured, and given that there is a shared vocabulary the premises are easier to target and the inferences are easier to undermine - which is actually good in the sense that the easier it is to receive attacks the faster you can adjust your inferences and premises. 2) Some of your criticisms that you apply to science is applicable to your work as well, given how it is structured. Your work isn't really receptive to paradigm change and you rely on needing to provide ad-hoc reasoning to account for the data that goes against your work. You tell others to test the things you say, but when someone does that and ends up with a different conclusion than you, from that you never ever infer that something is wrong with your conclusions and you always only infer that something was wrong with the person or with their method. You are completely paradigm locked there, because there isn't any test that can be done in principle that would undermine your conclusions, because you can infinitely use ad-hoc reasoning to maintain your paradigm. ------------------ Maybe there are arguments that can be given why even weak falsifiability isn't a good approach or why it is a limited approach, but in that context it becomes unclear how your work is superior to any other work who uses the exact same methodology and reasoning as you and ends up with different conclusions than you. Like you can always ask this question "Why cant that other guy mirror your justification and response and with that justify his own unique conclusion"? I wish