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As I said, who'd want to worship a superscientist? Magic's a whole nother thing.
No, I said 'this chair' (the inverted commas telling you I'm referring to the concept) has a real counterpart, whereas 'a chair' (the inverted commas again telling you I'm referring to the concept) has no real counterpart.
People choose to worship strange things. Is it only worship that makes a god?
You said "'this chair,'" I said that chair. My "that" refers to your "'this.'" Now 'that' we have 'this' out of the way, can you field an answer?
The gods forbid that you should become tedious! It's all there. Just read it.
Have you read this?
My disagreement with that article may come down to terminology ─ I'm not sure.
Try reading those articles again. It appears you didn't understand them. You are using a definition of objective that simply isn't applicable to the subject matter.
I don't use their terminology.
I'm afraid that it's their terminology that makes sense not yours. The problem is with you, not them.
If you think what I wrote in my previous post is wrong, please be specific about the error. This conversation is between you and me, not me and the authors of your link.
The specific errors in post 168 is:
'
Whether you follow the article or not, you can't arrive at what is moral except via your own judgment. No objective test will tell you whether any particular proposition is moral or not. Take a statement like,'We must exterminate the fire ant'. Good, bad, free of moral questions? The answers are the opinions of humans looking at human advantage against such concepts as respect for nature.
Our morality arises by natural selection, an amoral process. That is, morality doesn't exist so that we can good. It exists because for gregarious critters it benefits survival and breeding. As I said before, if a dolphin concluded that the greatest benefit she could bestow on dolphinkind was to eliminate the human race, would she be wrong? Why? Because that doesn't suit human opinion? Or because morality is objective and wrong is wrong?
As in my dolphin example.
For X to have objective existence is for X to exist independently of the concept of X in any brain. And yes, for me those things are real which have objective existence, and no other things. However it's not clear to me that everyone agrees.
It's true that arithmetic and its procedures arise out of human experience of reality, and have been constantly adjusted so as to conform with that. But this depends on human convenience and the way humans see the world. For there to be two sheep, you need a human to define the relevant physical region (let's call it the 'field') and the thing to be counted (let's call it the 'topic' and let's say 'sheep') and the test for relevance amongst the potential elements of the topic (eg 'all sheep I can see' or 'nearest sheep' or 'black sheep' or 'suitable for slaughter' &c). Same with pebbles, trees, parking police, and so on. And then from pebbles in a bag or notches on a stick on to abstractions like the numbers 1, 2, 3, and so on, concepts being derived from concepts, to build the edifice of maths.
We could argue that, I dare say. But there are no Euclidean points, lines, planes, no irrationals, infinities, outside of human thought. We have the concepts, defined with remarkable clarity, and the concepts have no real counterparts.
It isn't. Applied maths is like turning a crank and getting a machine-made answer. Calculators could do useful arithmetic long before computers. Computers doing maths execute predetermined procedures analogous to the cranked machine or the Jacquard loom. What they do is done in reality.
True, but the Riemann hypothesis is about as abstract, as conceptual, as lacking a real counterpart, as you could wish for. And when it's replaced by ArtieE's Theorem (Fields Medal winner 2022) showing that the hypothesis holds for all values, it'll still be as abstract, as lacking a real counterpart, as ever.
Just so.
The three chairs are an instantiation of the concept 'three'. They aren't the concept three itself. That still is only found in brains. That's why, until a human comes along and takes notice of the chairs, ie chooses (makes relevant) the room as the field, chair as the topic, and remarks their quantity, there's no threeness there, any more than there's (say) tenness for the room's furniture or twoness for the room's carpets unless and until someone deems those relevant and notices their quantity.
They lack real identity. Instead we're dealing with the abstraction 'something to sit on' or whatever.
You've done mental mathematics on real things. That's the only way that anything mathematical can occur. As I said, without selection of relevant fields and topics, there can be no maths applied to reality, and only brains make those selections.
So for you I'm sitting on 'a chair' which is for me 'this chair', yes. But we both know that there are many chairs in the world, so it's a matter of particularity, not a matter of existence (at least in this case). It's the way the brain works by such abstractions that's interesting.
Why not? I'm genetically a social animal, with behavioral traits and attitudes built in.
What's an example of a moral rule not influenced by personal feelings? Isn't the whole basis of morality about how the individual relates to others? And from there by extension to how groups relate?
Ends up being a pretty big range of circumstances, from working on a Saturday to being gay to drawing some pictures.
And as you say, since I equate the two, no surprise.
Yes, but even within a common culture there are debates. For example, although there's a most-common answer to the Trolley problem, there are other answers as well. I recall reading an article a while back by an admired public health administrator in retirement, about how much a human life was indeed worth when you were in charge of finite money resources.
I'm puzzled why you think the result of an e-calculation might be meaningful in the absence of a relevant human.
And as you know, my view is firmly that they don't.
There is no objective validation of a moral principle, no. (There may be an evolutionary explanation, but that's not the same thing, since nothing moral was involved in evolving it.) There's simply greater or lesser consensus, based on a mix of genes / evolution, culture and personal nature and experience.
Amen. But even in the presence of God, no one can suggest an example of objective morality that will last more than ten seconds in sunlight.
Correct me if I misunderstand, but you seem to be saying that I've erred in pointing out that maths and its conclusions exist only conceptually, and don't run around in the wilds of nature. If that's right, what error? If I've misunderstood, what point were you making?
We get our concepts of 'chair' as infants turning to look where our mother is pointing and looking as she says 'chair'. The interesting thing is how the brain deals with categories by the resulting abstractions of 'chairness'.
All morality comes from subjectivity. Conscience, duty, fairness, justice, are all in our respective brains, albeit our genes designed the module they run in. If we don't feel it, then very largely we don't do it, so (speaking as one who feels it) full marks to nature for a system effective in influencing behavior.
In asking people who support objective morality to put an example of an objectively moral proposition on the table where we can inspect it, my intention is to underline that there are no such propositions.
You and the authors of the articles I quoted and me we aren't on the same page blü 2. Not even in the same book. Not even in the same galaxy. Your questions have no meaning in our galaxy. So I can't answer.