Scholar

Yes but that is not the problem with progressives. The problem with progressives is, if you ever actually were in a social space in which they dominate, is that if you step out of the ideological bounds of whatever they currently deem the moral imperative of the universe that you will be pressured into agreeing with them not through understanding and expansion of empathy but through sheer peer enforcement. Words like racist, fascist, transphobe, sexist, white-supremacist etc have been employed at basically every occasion it was feasible to do so, often times against people engaging in things that are just normal to them. You can't get moral progress this way, because people actually have to expand their identity. If you do it all through peer pressure, it leads to a contraction and conditional moral behavior. You can't force people into empathy, it just doesn't work this way. I truly despise progressives, because I consider myself an actual progressive. I believe there are issues of such importance that every day we keep focusing on nonsense issues like trans rights or racism we basically are causing the equivalent of the holocaust. To me, people actually are akin to nazis. In fact the average joe to me is more akin to a interdimensional child-eating pedophile nazi, yet I can compose myself, be the adult in the room and realize that this won't change by me screeching at everyone by calling them human supremacist and pressuring them all to care about animal rihts. It just doesn't work. We are so far from solving these issues because all of this pure mental illness is just infecting everything and everyone around me. I have to listen to their mental diarrhea and watch how they self-righteously ruin all potential for progress while they don't realize they aren't better than the so-called fascists they themselves criticize. Look at what happened to Ana Kasparian, she stated that she was basically uncomfortable with homeless people roaming the streets and the danger of getting attacked after she was molested by one and progressives lashed out at her as if she was Hitler 2.0, and now she has actually become an ally of the Trumpists.

You deny that progressives have been trying to get people to act in line through various means of demonization and shaming?

This is what happens when you create a progressive culture that attempts to force moral progress through tactics grounded in fear and shaming. The reason why things like cancel culture have been so profoundly destructive is because it teaches individuals to fall in line for self-preservation. If you do not act according to the rules of the progressives, you will be socially ostracized. I don't know if people still remember how insane things have been 8 years ago, but progressives were completely intolerable lunatics who were constantly getting together to socially shame people for the mildest things imaginable. The problem with this is that even if you get people to behave well, it is not going to be grounded in anything resembling ethical progress. Instead of having focused on making people more empathetic so that they see why doing some of these things is wrong, you focused on making them scared to say whatever you don't want them to say. Moral behavior becomes a function of a contracted ego that seeks self-preservation (avoidance of shame, for example), meaning people become more and more selfish instead of more and more empathetic. Once you remove the stimulus of shame or it simply loses it's power because people realize that everyone around them is fed up with the tyranny of the progressives, all of the moral progress you have will be erased immediately. People never cared about minorities, they only cared about not being called a racist. And this is what killed the progressive movement and what caused this absurd backlash, put on steroid through social media. And people still have not learned. Both sides are now even more immature than they have been a decade ago.

"White Supremacist, Patriarchal Culture"... really?

Yes, I don't think it will be necessarily interesting to go in that direction because Martin seems to be just uninterested in those sorts of things. If he has mastery, it is probably in other, more practical areas around employing psychedelics etc. I think it's hard to challenge someone like Martin Ball, or even Leo, in an interview, because of how confident they are in their positions, and because of the role they perceive themselves to have within those conversations. It's a teacher-student dynamic, and for there to be a challenging in depth discussion would require a shift to a peer-to-peer dynamic. I think the Pre/Trans fallacy might apply to Martin to some degree, where Martin might be stuck in some of the rationalistic modes. It definitely appears this way when he uses physics talk to ground his understand of energy and then sort of misses the foundations of what those concepts entail.

Martin Ball is philosophically illiterate and is profoundly overconfident in how he talks about metaphysics and "energy", he is so far off that he isn't even tracking the issues at hand. He is so illiterate that he is at the "Metaphysics isn't real" stage while being some sort of confused form of Physicalist not realizing that participating in physics already requires a set of metaphysical stances. He is oblivious to how his own conceptual framework is constructed. The guy conflates metaphysics with the term "supernatural".

Yes? How many people are following that guy though? Sadhguru can give off some pretty strong cult vibes, although he is at a level where we would just call it a new religion. It's hard for me to gage that. I feel like most of what he says of value are just extrapolated yogic teachings/frameworks, I am not sure if he necessarily needs a direct experience to be able to present himself the way he does. But of course it could equally be the case that he has some mastery over his mind but remains delusional in other areas.

It seems like my impression of what he said was exaggerated. He claims various things about having created an eternal Linga that will cleanse people from dark energies (including the occult) if they visit. He also claims the spiritual knowledge of how to create such a Linga was uploaded into him by his Guru through a touch of his forehead with his staff. https://ia804504.us.archive.org/8/items/mystic-s-musings/mystic-s-musings.pdf

He says he has manifested a magical mecury block that instantly enlightens everyone who visits it.

From my point of view philosophy has virtually no real world relevancy, certainly not academic philosophy. The problem with engaging with it on more abstract terms is that philosophy is mostly about building elaborate, logically consistent mental constructs. It's like theoretical physics without any contact to any verifiable reality, which is why you have such diverse viewsets amongst philosophers. The only things you can generate agreement on is on things that only have one logical possibility. So in the end that's what's most academic philosophers do. They test each others mental constructs for logical consistency (not the only factor but the main factor) and think they succeeded if they have a construct that is unable to be shown to be propositionally false. And most of that process is fueled by identity. The vast majority of philosophers do no introspective or deconstructive work relating to their identity and really just generate mental constructs that fit their identity. I mean if you talk to most academic philsophers and you just prong them why they are a Hegelian over some other obscure philosophical trend, they will tell you because it was most compelling to them. And the reason why it was most compelling was because some of the foundational thinking felt more correct to them than the thinking of other philosophical movements. Most of what feels right or not right is just determined by your identity. I disagree. Intelligence is the first answer people give when they justify killing animals, because their identity has a distinct separation between themselves and that subgroup. The reason why Peter Singer was so convincing is because he made an argument from Marginal Cases, which clearly shows us that individuals we do care about are non-intelligent and therefore that it is not logically feasible to use that as grounds to discriminate against others. You can tell someone "But what if you had a son and a daughter who fell in love, do you really believe they should go to prison for that if there is no sign of coercion?", that will not convince them that we shouldn't stigmatize and imprison people for incest. Mostly this is the case because they cannot actually imagine the situation vividly enough to recognize the suffering they are inflicting onto someone they would love. If we could employ hypotheticals this way, moral progress wouldn't be taking so long. By the way, for this reason, storytelling has been the main vehicle for moral communication for all of human history, including today. Most people get their values from the media they consume, because whereas previously your imagination might have failed, if the story is compelling enough, it will give you insight into something about yourself that you could previously not access. The problem is that their identity fundamentally has made a distinction between themselves and animals. This is why people get deeply offended at comparing racism to speciesism. They view animals as inferior, as a funciton of their identity, which means if you compare a human to an animal, you degrade that human to the level of an inferior being. The best way to make someone less racist is having them interact with people of the other race in an environment in which some cooperation is necessary. The same is true for sexual minorities and even animals. People don't have any qualms about calling for violence against people who abuse dogs and cats. We consider our pets part of our family, part of our identity. People are horrified at the idea of eating dogs almost as much as eating humans. And that's a healthy response.

Quite happy to see this. Rationalists being open to the idea of God and basically being correct about how to attain it. Alex O'Connor is quite a robust thinker, hopefully he will explore this path more deeply in the future.

Remove the term morality and replace it with something like "subjective drive". I am basically remaining in the Isness of subjectivity, oughtness is illusiory. Short version is that fundamentally, subjectivity seeks to actualize itself in some shape or form. It is a process of unfolding itself. All subjectivities fundamentally attempt to maximize the expression of their own subjectivity. In this relation, subjectivities can be irrational in the way they behave, understand themselves and the world. Given that the only thing you always do and could possibly do is an unfolding of your subjectivity, you subjectivity can be misaligned with it's own aim, which is the unfolding of itself to the maximal degree. Such misalignment is pathology and the unfoldement of subjectivity will strive to correct that pathology over time, given the increase in complexity and the immutable characteristic of maximizing it's own will/expression. You can correct pathology in world and identity modelling. The problem is that identity is primary and will determine what the capacity for world and self-modelling is for the given individual. You cannot simply convince a staunch Islamist that they are irrational about their beliefs in Islam. Intelligence is a tool in the hands of identity, not the other way around. For this reasons I predict that LLMs will cause profound harm and suffering in the next decades, given that lower-intelligence identities can employ higher intelligence tools to maintain and spread their own identity structures. This is not the case I am making. Moral arguments can be useful in both convincing others and exploring the reality of ones own subjectivity. However, for arguments to be compelling and move individuals it already requires a significantly shared identity. Most individuals you can convince with pure reason are usually individuals whose identity values things like rationality and logical consistency significantly. However, even in those cases, given the explosive epistemic nature of reality and the self, it is sometimes impossible even to convince identities who care about reason because in many cases there is uncertainty around what is true. For a rational actor to be moved from their position, in most cases it requires rendering that position clearly irrational. Most often this is difficult or impossible to do. Meaning, as long as a position is tenable to hold, an identity will avoid abandoning if it is attached to it. You can imagine a scenario in which mentally disabled individuals simply do not exist. In that case, the argument from marginal cases (one of the most compelling arguments against speciesism) would simply not hold any compelling ethical force. There are more complex ethical issues that do not have such clear reductios and therefore individuals can easily maintain whatever their preferred view is without appearing irrational. Individuals aren't primarily rational agents, but social agents. We model our identity around the social realities that surround us, not around what is rational and truthful. I think the way people reason around this issue is not really conducive to human progress. Animal liberation is mainly about how our identities relate to others. If we had applied utilitarian logic this way to issues like slavery, we would have forever procrastinated the abolition of slavery. "What about animals, they are also slaves, if you think it's immoral to have slaves, do you also refuse to use animals as objects?!", "What about people abroad? Is it really that much worse to keep free range slaves if on the other side of the planet chinese slave-workers have to make our cheap products?". The way things change is through an evolution of identity and the adoption of new virtues. With slavery, we considered it wrong to view human beings as objects, we recognized human beings as a means in and of themselves, rather than a means to an end. If someone wore human skin or ate human flesh, we would be horrified at this. Why? Because we would recognize that the individual who participated in that act related to other conscious beings in a fundamentally pathological way. They objectified humans to such a degree that they could tolerate using them as mere objects. As long as we are not horrified by the sight of animal corpses being consumed and worn as items of clothing, we know our identities are pathological. Once we are horrified, the laws and behaviors will align. This recognition can only occur if we recognize in animals the same individuation we recognize in ourselves. Slavery was not abolished because we made consequentialist arguments that lead us to change our policies or consumer behavior, but because we have found ourselves horrified at the idea of viewing human beings as objects. A person ought to cease consuming animal products not because it minimizes death or suffering, but because the only healthy response to seeing the mutilated body parts of a tortured individual is horror.

Yes, people tend to find the argument very attractive, it was recently explored by Kane B: I have seen other studies that specifically went into the estimated counts of how many animals are likely saved by a switch to a plant based diet by the average individual. I think the arguments from consequentialists are mostly mental gymnastics to avoid the clear conclusion that changing how we relate to animals is a clear ethical obligation. I am not a fan of consequentialism in general though as it is such an epistemically explosive approach that you can justify almost anything or be skeptical about almost anything in relation to what is moral. Most people who are consequentialist contort it to fit whatever their already established values are. In my view the correct approach to ethics is to view it as a discovery of the nature of the self and how it's imperatives relate to itself and the world. The reasons why animals are treated the way they are today is not because we are imperfect moral thinkers, but because we do not recognize the self in animals. Societies moral rules are largely a propositonalized form of it's contemporary subjective drives. If those drives are immature or pathological, what you will observe are immature and pathological moral rules/incentives. In other words, the problem is not that people have not found the right arguments to lead them to the conclusion that we ought to treat animals with basic respect, but the fact that the identity of most thinking agents drives them to construct mental models that will allow them to continue expressing their identity in whatever way currently generates the least friction within their psyche. Most moral philosophy conducted today is a complete waste of human cognition for this reason.

Christian debaters often employ the argument of the ethics of incest against secularists. There is a long history of this, and it is surprising to me that secularists have such profound difficulty admitting that consensual incest is neither wrong, disgusting nor fundamentally pathological. The arguments provided by secularists are functionally no different from homophobes in the past. In this case, Craig asserts that relationships between siblings are more prone to end in depression and suicidality. The first thing to note here is that such evidence simply does not exist. There is no study that looks at the outcomes of incestuous relationships between siblings. There in fact is no study looking at incestuous relationships period. The only studies we have look at incestuous abuse and incestuous incidents in general. And the studies including non-abusive behavior do not support this view at all, in fact when incestuous interactions between siblings occur in a consensual way, the impact on things like sexual confidence tends to be positive in the long run in women, for example. But more pressingly, it wouldn't be surprising if it was the case that incestuous relationships did end up in depression and suicidality, given that such relationships are highly stigmatized and criminalized in many jurisdictions. The effect the resulting shame, social isolation and fear of criminal prosecuting will have on the psychology of individuals is obviously going tend to yield negative outcomes. It's not different from homophobes of the past, including notable psychologist, having pointed at empirical data that homosexual urges and activities come with shame and self-destructive tendencies. The effects of the bigotry are used to justify the bigotry. There is of course many more secular arguments against consensual incest between siblings and cousins that appear to be strong at first, and turn out absurdly contradictory on further inspection, but I think this example is telling because it would be so easy to simply admit: Obviously the solution to consensual incestuous feelings and relationships is not stigma and criminalization, but social support and integration, especially when they are pathological. In relation to our attitudes, we should obviously reject our biological impulses when we know they had a specific evolutionary function that no longer applies in this day and age. This extends to incestophobia as much as it did to things like homophobia or racism. What this whole situation reveals is that bigotry and ignorance is not nearly as simple as it appears to be. It's not the case that the secularists and progressives have transcended forms of sexual persecution and witch hunting. In essence, they function the same when they are confronted with things that are sufficiently repulsive to them. The first reaction is not empathy towards individuals in such a situation, but rationalization of feelings of disgusting and hatred. If we realize this, we can have more empathy with various forms of bigotry, because we can recognize in ourselves the dynamics which lead someone to adopt such views.

I want to stress that we as a society never get to see positive and healthy examples of such relationships because the stigma and criminalization selects for pathology. Not only is every media that depicts incest basically doing so from the point of view of it being inherently pathological and immoral, but so is every case of incest that is brought to the public. Only individuals who are exceptionally irresponsible or abusive actually get exposed through various forms of inquiry. Individuals who are responsible, either do not engage in such relationships, only do so in the short term or maintain secrecy. Furthermore, individuals who develop feelings towards their family members have no framework through which to express or internalize those in a healthy way. This itself drives them towards pathology. There is no valid way to express these feelings, to talk about them, to know how to deal with them. Couples who do choose to maintain a relationship are driven into secrecy and social isolation, to such a degree that we know individuals who become victims of abuse do not reach out to family or police in fear of their relationship being exposed. This means there are various factors, even more so than with homosexuality (given there is a stronger selective pressure here in absence of a drive that is immutable) that highly biases this phenomena towards pathology. We know that pathology emerges under conditions of repression, secrecy and criminalization, it was the case with every other form of sexuality that was stigmatized this way. One of the key issues is that incest is viewed (intentionally) as a monolithic phenomena. We group in incestuous child-predation. parent-child grooming, relationships with significant powerdynamics into the same phenomena as perfectly consensual relationships between equivalent individuals and even those who did not grow up in a familial context. It's all incest, and we somehow evaluate it as if it was one thing we had to determine was either wrong or acceptable. But this is obviously absurd. When we consider if interracial relationships are acceptable, we don't look at how white slave masters raped their black slaves and then think to ourselves "As a whole, are interracial sexual acts positive or negative?", or look at child predation perpretrated by homosexual predators and lump them in with homosexual acts as a whole. Clearly there are forms of incestuous interactions and relationships that are unacceptable. Sometimes the argument of powerdynamics can apply, especially when there is large age gaps or family members are put in positions of authority over others. But the fact that we have people in here who consider the phenomena of adult siblings around the same age being in a romantic relationship to be the equivalent of catholic priest raping children is really everything you need to know about how unsophisticated our approach is. And sadly, predators and groomers benefit from this confusion, from the taboo, from the shame and silence of their victims and the utter inability of us to actually pinpoint and articulate where the actual problems lie.

Sure, "Homosexuality is wrong from my direct experience, and everyone close to me got hurt in the end.". Not that long ago, this would have been a common statement of individuals who engaged in homosexuals acts when they were still demonized. Given that you brought your own experience into this as a way of making an argument from authority, but do not actually get into what happened, I will speculate: If what happened to you was not abuse, I wager the only factors that made it "wrong" were probably either in relation to the consequences the break-up of the romantic relationship had for your familial relationships in general, or it was due various factors resulting from the stigmatization of such a relationship: The shame, secrecy and inter-familial conflict that resulted from the fact that such relationships are considered inherently taboo in our society (no different from interracial or homosexual relationships in the past). To therefore project wrongness onto the act itself, contributing to the demonization of individuals who find themselves in such relationships (be it due to parental neglect, development of codependency and so forth) to me is irresponsible. You are just making it less likely that individuals in such situations are able to get help, because you do condemn and consider them wrong for being in that situation.

There is no bait here. You are projecting your own experience onto everyone else, this is what is happening. Which is equivalent to an individual projecting their "bad interracial" experience onto interracial experiences as whole. We have data on this. When incest happens in a consensual context, even between minors, it has generally no negative impacts and sometimes even has positive impacts on things like sexual confidence in females. But independent of what your own experience is, you should be able to articulate what makes incest universally wrong, meaning that individuals who participate in such relationships are universally immoral for doing so (independent of if they had grown up together, are twins, their relationship being perfectly healthy and maybe even legal etc).

So you are generalizing from your own experience onto everyone? Do you realize that this is as problematic as a victim of homosexual child predation projecting their own experience onto homosexuality as a universal?

The same basically applied to homosexuality when it was illegal. And no, this is not actually true, there are lawyers in germany for example who specialize in cases in which family members (often siblings reunited in adulthood), get criminally prosecuted as other family members report them to the police. Even if this was not the case however, the fact that it is defacto illegal and highly stigmatized means that all the negative impacts of such laws apply to such individuals. I'm not going to look up bigots for you, there is plenty on them to be found. Whenever the topic comes up online you have a majority who views incest as revolting and evil.

No, incest is prosecuted whenever it is discovered which is mostly in the context of other crimes being committed (because it's exceptionally difficult to detect individuals who are in non-abusive relationships and maintain secrecy, and to also prove it in a court of law). Homosexuality was also exceptionally rarely prosecuted outside of abuse when it was still illegal, that doesn't mean that individuals who were in these relationships didn't fear legal prosecution and social destruction if they ever revealed their relationship. What about my framing is trivial? Why is it wrong, and where is the evidence that everybody gets hurt in the end?

Notice how desperate you are to maintain the idea that consensual incest is obviously wrong. You don't even consider the possibility that you could be wrong about this. Your underlying revulsion is so intense that you are incapable of engaging with this topic in a mature way. That is precisely what bigotry is. There is countless of academic papers analyzing the ethics and criminalization of incest, and most of them come to conclude that the way we are handling it today has little rational basis. Ethics boards, philosophers, legal scholars, many of whom are putting their reputation on the line given how controversial such things tend to be.

A lot of things Trump has done over the past months have given me the impression that he could be preparing an actual takeover of the entire government within his term. He has normalized military deployment within the country, he has created a mass dehumanization and deportation apparatus that would would be satirical if it wasn't reality and he seems to be preparing for actual wars with other countries which could give him the ability to call for martial law or whatever else he has planned. It still doesn't seem realistic to me that he would actually attempt this given the severe risk it entails, but it is mindblowing to me that all of these things are happening and people seem to be only mildly concerned about it. What is also concerning is that a large portion of the country would support him. What would it be, 10-20% of the country? That seems enough to actually establish a new political regime. The fact that he could try and potentially be successful itself is concerning.

This isn't true. Decriminalization did not lead to an increase of overdose deaths compared to other regions in the US, and overdose deaths have been declining before recriminalization occured, for various reasons like treatment, less supply and preventative measures. You just got caught up by right wing propaganda. What happened is that drug problems became more visible to the public, and now they can continue not caring about the issues because all the homeless have to kill themselves with drug overdoses in secret. We know that there are better models than criminalization of use. Oregon right now also does not harshly punish individuals for small possession or use. Either way, I am not sure what any of this has to do with the bigotry of progressives. You can make a reasonable case that individuals must be restricted from taking substances that will literally alter their minds and kill them. The irony here is that progressives will defend criminals and drug addicts (even when it might harm them), but treat benign low risk sexual deviancy as if it was the greatest moral horror the world has ever seen. Because functionally their minds are not that far apart from conservatives.

Well, at least we can say we live in interesting times.

Drug use in China is rampant, mental illness in China is rampant. Don't delude yourself that they have a better system than even the US do. China is utter chaos. Either way, it doesn't matter what China does. We have studies showing that deterrence in this respect (criminalizing usage) is not effective. Criminalization seems to increase deaths from overdose and usage according to the data I saw. And morality is important here. Even if there was a marginal gain in harm reduction, this doesn't justify the morally abhorrent reality of imprisoning individuals for their addiction. This is simply evil.