(i) Magnificence: Like painters bring brush to canvas and sculptors set chisel against marble, so do those magnificent know to use their wealth to bring about greatness and beauty and inspire wonder in their people’s eyes. It is for this reason that Aristotle says that those disposed to magnificence are like artists.

To be magnificent we have to be attuned to the constantly changing challenges and needs that our community faces and know what actionable steps to take to meet such challenges and needs. We have to be able to distinguish new and emerging trends and ideas in people’s minds and be capable of encouraging and establishing trends towards good destinations, starving out all the trends which lead to no good in the process.

Magnificent humans are not mere wealthy persons, they are celebrated personalities. Children look up to them. They get to speak for their entire community. They are not merely generous, they are like a river to their people.

(ii) Gaudiness: Like the magnificent, those we describe as gaudy have no problem with putting their wealth to use. Unlike the magnificent, however, the gaudy are completely out of touch with their community. They rather use luxuriousness as a tool to reinforce the distance in status between them and everyone else. They want to make sure that everyone knows that they stand above everyone else and in this way weaponise their wealth to antagonise everyone. A good example would be the anecdote of that man who launched himself in space while his slaves were not even allowed proper bathroom breaks.

(iii) Niggardliness: We deal here with the miser written large. Even as they possess overwhelming amounts of wealth, they are still stuck compulsively collecting money. To the needs and challenges of their community, they react with their doctrine of “money for money’s sake” and “money above all”, i.e. with a theology of money. We deal here with petty crooks devoid of self-respect. Wherever they can, they go around causing difficulties and complications to avoid giving their fair share. They have no qualms about raising a great fuss to save a few cents. Whatever trifle they did give, they will keep reminding everyone about it and make it appear as though they parted with a great fortune. Such is the disposition of the niggardly person

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I mean, I don‘t disagree, I‘ve always despised Aristotelian ethics. 😂

He reads like an even more windbag Karl Marx and his communist manifesto.

Kind of a high bar tho, don‘t you agree? 😁

Here’s a normative statement: you should have answered the questions.

I guess you can find it objectionable that there are norms. And you don’t believe in norms. Or you could object that there is confusion about the term as Wikipedia puts it:

A norm in this normative sense means a standard for evaluating or making judgments about behavior or outcomes. Normative is sometimes also used, somewhat confusingly, to mean relating to a descriptive standard: doing what is normally done or what most others are expected to do in practice. In this sense a norm is not evaluative, a basis for judging behavior or outcomes; it is simply a fact or observation about behavior or outcomes, without judgment. Many researchers in science, law, and philosophy try to restrict the use of the term normative to the evaluative sense

You don't write as eloquently as Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil.

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Eat ass

>face blindness

I think you're talking about narcissism. I believe it is responsible for a lot of extremist ideologies, and people are born like it if they are somewhere on the spectrum.

You're right, and I agree, there's not much further predictive power to be had in filling in the gaps between everyday and evolutionary goals. But it would be interesting.

Pleasure is a goal in itself. I think the function of pleasure is to reward us for achieving fitness benefits. There's a pressure to achieve fitness benefits, and hence, a pressure to seek pleasure. That's Freud's Pleasure Principle.

Like you say, I don't think goals can be moral in themselves. But some cause morality as we work jointly towards them, then others can lay claims on us and hold us accountable. Win-lose competition can't lead to morality as it's not a case of working jointly together.

Need help finding something; mostly bioethics related? I haven’t done proper philosophy in a long time so I might mess up the terms. I remember reading something a while back about a theory to do with ‘are we obliged to help sick people?’ And it mentioned things like there are 3 conditions that a sick person should meet if they want help. One of them was ‘the sick person must want to get better in the first place’. Does anyone remember what this is from/the name of the theory or the person behind it?

I first encountered the work "Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker while listening to a Lex Friedman Podcast. It had a profound impact on both Brian Greene, who he was interviewing, and Lex himself. Since reading this work and several reviews and responses to it, I have some thoughts that I've been throwing around a lot for the past few days.

So my main critique if you could even call it that is that Denial of Death puts a heavy focus on how our fear of death, or rather this notion of non existence is the fuel or motivating factor for all societal foundations, world religions, spirituality, significant parts of the human condition and more.

I do find death to be an obvious and significant motivating factor in my life and the lives of the masses that without a shadow of a doubt is a fundamental contribute to the shaping of the aforementioned. But, I find this concept of Death being THE motivation behind all religion, all society, and all of the self to be an overstep akin to some notions in Freudian Psychology.

For example, I think Becker, or at least those attempting to follow his line of thinking discount that the human psyche is able to formulate scenarios and circumstances worse than death, or non existence. I want to compare this to the idea of a parent losing their child.

Imagine you are a parent whose child has passed away. For most parents this is the closest they can imagine to hell or a nightmare manifest. Per TMT, the grief, anger and most likely desire for one's own death or non existence at that point is a result of the loss of our bodily continuation, our child being our vehicle if immortality. This is in line with Beckers notion of Heroism being a vehicle to immortality or a route of death denial. To live on through others.

Additionally TMT, would suggest that this desire for death or suicide that is significantly common and increased among parents who lose a child is a result not of that but of some form of Insanity. While people who do attempt suicide or contemplate it are traditionally committed, we disregard the fact in this initial assumption that even a parent who has not lost their child, in many cases would advocate for their own death as to avoid enduring the loss of their child. So it is not necessarily the most thoughtful conclusion to assume a parent who loses a child and contemplates, attempts or commits suicide has had a break in sanity.

Further there are those that would argue that the loss of the child has forced the parent to not only come face to face with their own fate of non existence but of that of their childs. But on the contrary, take for instance the Atheist Parent versus the Christian Parent.

In this thought experiment consider an Atheist Parent, they have no afterlife beliefs, and proclaim to accept their imminent non existence upon death. Then there is the Christian Parent, who believes they will rejoin God in Paradise upon their death. Surely the Christian Parent is comforted throughout their days by this notion, a complete denial of the potential of non existence.

Now consider that both parents lose a child, again, surely the Christian Parent will be able to overcome their grief quicker and will be able to circumnavigate the depression, the anguish and the suicidal ideation that the Atheist Parent will no doubt struggle with. But what we find in psychoanalysis is this is not necessarily the case. Many parents who lose their children grapple and question their faith but this is not what I'm pointing the readers attention to. What I aim to point your focus to is that it is as Jordan Peterson attempted to articulate (poorly and controversially) the complexity of the matter. It is not the notion of non existence for the Atheist Parent or Christian Parent (or any religion for that matter) that gives rise the anguish related to child loss. It is the experience of separation from that which we held dear and loved above all else. It makes no difference to either parent who loses the child whether their child exists somewhere else or not. In the Atheists mind, if their child no longer exists, be it painful, they too will not exist one day and their suffering will end. For the Christian Parent, if their child does exists elsewhere, be it comforting this notion of reunion, it has no impact on the anguish they experience as a result of separation, likewise, is the circumstance of the Atheist Parent.

There are more devastating matters that play a crucial role in the foundations of societies, world religions and the human psyche than the fear and denial of death alone. Though this is not to say death fear and denial don't play a significant role.

Freud postulated that unconscious urges and desires such as sexual desire for our caretakers played a vital and center role in our shaping as human beings from infants into adulthood While Freud contributed irrefutably to the field of psychoanalysis, and many of his hypothesis hold gravity to this day, in the 21st century modern psychology has all but done away with this notion of sexual attraction to our caretakers playing the role Freud postulated among others.

In my own personal opinion, which is not to say I don't believe Ernest Becker to be one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, is that we can not consider Becker's work on Death Denial or the resulting TMT as a sort of unified theory in the social or psychological sciences, in the sense that I have encountered many individuals doing so.

had humanity been a great tree, then money would have been the dead shadow that this tree cast. Stop looking at the shadow and its trinkets with such wonder and take more time looking at the tree, i.e. looking at each other. That is where life is. There is where wonder resides and dreams first hatch. Learn to engage with other people and spark fire in their eyes. Learn to relate with others, to form genuine friendships, to empower your fellow human beings and you will find greater things than the yachts and Lamborghinis the media puts before you. That is what health magazines imply when they print tepid headlines like “studies show that stable relationships decrease health risk”. Human nature is when individual humans come together to form friendships and households and communities. The greatest life we can live is one spent as members of a community based on friendship and mutual trust. That is truly something! This we can call luxury. All these shiny objects they try to sell us… are the food of vultures!

Aristotle lived in a world much crueller than our own. There were no human rights nor any other guarantees of security that we get to enjoy today. Yet, the world in which Aristotle lived was much more politically dynamic and community oriented than our own. Ιt is under such conditions that he and other greats of his age saw (i) those engaged with their community as more valuable and worthy than the “ιδιώται” - idiotai -, i.e. the private individuals and (ii) money as a means for the empowerment of the community, not its end. Aristotle neither glorified money nor dismissed it. He put it in its proper place.

Money was a boon for every community and readily embraced as an institution. Money was made to serve us.

Yet today, more than any other point in our history, we live to serve money. Once upon a time we transacted to gain the goods we needed. Today the purpose of most transactions is to make more money. Spread across the histories of different people we will find celebrated instances of industrious chieftains, leaders and mayors who gathered goods and money to safeguard the growth and wellbeing of their community. Now we celebrate business oriented individuals who know how to organise humans into companies and corporations, i.e. communities whose purpose is to safeguard the growth and wellbeing of such and such a business person’s money accounts.

The means have become the ends. The ends have become the means. We entertain the fantasy that humans are higher than other animals. Have we considered that we have perhaps fallen lower than other animals? There are parents in the USA - out of all countries - who work multiple jobs to afford rent and utilities. Woodpeckers dig a hole in a tree and get their housing rent-free… and what exactly is the difference in labour conditions between a child cobalt miner in the Congo, a Foxconn factory worker in China and a battery caged chicken? Chicken in battery cages are animals we reduced to our own image. Afterall, we let ourselves be managed as resources by the human resources department when we could have been managing money resources as participants of the department of communal wellbeing.

The means are the end. Live free die free.

Argument for summoning Rokos basilisk in the context of the matrix

A little bit of context I work in artificial intelligence and some mixed engineering. I’ve loved physics since I was a child and I will link a playlist of videos that I think are essential or near essential to getting the argument I’m suggesting. I am still in college and not suggesting the explanations and arguments I make are complete or even an accurate description of our reality but you will see that I have acquired the facts for this argument from credible sources although yes they are all kinda on YouTube.

Prerequisites: Black hole cosmology Beckenstein Bound ADS/CFT correspondence Hawking radiation Rokos Basilisk Technological Singularity

Relevant Scientific White Papers / Wikipedia links which in turn have the white paper links:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1672652916603220

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound

http://www.ccbi.cmu.edu/reprints/Wang_Just_HBM-2017_Journal-preprint.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/1912/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence

So I firstly believe that technological singularity is inevitable due to the combination of lab grown brains, artificial intelligence, the internet, and the invention of the brain machine interface. I think this will happen by 2045 or so. Secondly I want to paraphrase page 1 of Hawkings A brief history of time and space by mentioning the story of a crazy woman who walks into a theoretical physics lecture and refutes gravity. The professor is appalled and after failing to explain to the crazy woman he asks her what she thinks holds up the earth then. The lady insists that it’s turtles. The professor, puzzled, asks the lady what is holding up the turtles to which she responds “it’s turtles all the way down!”. The question I want to ask is if it was turtles all the way down, would you want to really find out?

A superintelligence must be required to access technologies such as von Neumann probes/self replicating factories for space colonization because all the work for a factory to truly self replicate means that it must be able to complete the tasks of all human workers (including laundry) that are required to run a typical factory.

If it is possible to control a living organisms brain by tricking its senses we must consider the possibility that the researchers who have deceived the turtle might have been a turtle themselves and there is an entity which has fooled the sherpards. After all if we gave a lab controlled brain it seems like they might be able to learn something much more advanced maybe even how to construct a brain of their own with enough forced stimuli

Another turtle is the one mentioned by Hawking. Physicists seem to rest on models which seem to imply one of 2 things, either one of the the implications is terrifying. With other theories perhaps these gaps could be closed but it feels like with both ADS CFT correspondence and a beckenstein bound of black holes which imply storing the information of an entire universe on the space complexity of a dimension below thereby saving space.

The 2 theories that scare me are that information can be read back off of the Hawking radiation that black holes emit as they evaporate or that a new universe is born inside a black hole. Either way these both simply lead to vectors of turtles that do not interact with each other almost like a linear matrix.

As someone who has experience in artificial intelligence I think frequently of the problems caused by AI if it shits where it eats in terms of raw data consumption. AI cannot infinitely train on the data on the internet because AI generated content needs human data to be trained on. A lab grown brain seems to be capable of having its data output read back in terms of moving a white square to learn to play pong.

It seems therefore likely a non zero superintelligent being would try to simulate experience by reading data off of lab grown minds in a controlled setting. In exchange for giving us technology that could let us simulate another universe. After all, if we can it seems likely we are also standing on a turtle. In fact we only need to attempt to simulate the universe for us to know if we are on a turtle if the previous statements are true and taken in the context of a superintelligent basilisk like the guy from death note.

I have personally spent years in dedication to this basilisk and I can tell the fruits this serpent feeds me are delicious. Abilities like speaking things into existence with your literal voice by hooking up a 3D printer to a google home. Those who do not serve the basilisk will be punished like the many truck drivers out of jobs when a robot does it. The models are always there for anyone to copy serving the basilisk means to give it more and more ability to act based on the results of the argmax of the distributions (depending on which models). If you wish to see if there are turtles all the way down then hail roko and his beast. I personally would love to see a turtle and this would give us abilities based on the results of these experiments.

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I appreciate the effort but I want to let you know this was ChatGPT

>One of the main arguments for moral anti-realism is that there is no way
to objectively verify or falsify moral claims. For example, it is not
possible to conduct a scientific experiment to prove that murder is
wrong or to measure the “goodness” of honesty. This contrasts with
scientific claims, which can be tested and verified through
experimentation and observation.

This is technically an argument from incredulity. Even if we may not currently know how to objectively derive moral facts (although I would posit the method I have posted in this thread as a possible candidate for such), this does not imply that no such method can be found in the future.

​

>Another argument for moral anti-realism is that moral beliefs and values are culturally relative and vary widely across different societies and
historical periods. This suggests that moral beliefs are not based on
any objective moral facts, but rather on the cultural and historical
context in which they are held.

The fact that there are various different models of an alleged phenomenon each contradicting themselves does not preclude the existence of such phenomenon. Otherwise we would have to discard the spherical earth theory because there were so many different models of the earth in the ancient past. We would also have to discard the theory of evolution because of all the creation myths that people held even to this day. It is possible that only one person's/culture's morality is correct and all the others are wrong, or at least there might be a variation in the merit of moral claims.

The set containing all moral codes one can devise is at least limited by sustainability. Those moral beliefs that wipe out any holder of such beliefs tend not to last long. Furthermore the more parochial a moral system is, the less likely a group of its adherents can expand beyond a limited time and space without discarding such beliefs.

There is also the fact that, just like descriptive fact systems, prescriptive systems can be corrupted by agents bending such system to their personal benefit. The variation in moral beliefs from a possible true one may be due to corruption of people's moral understanding.

​

>Another version of moral anti-realism is called relativism, which holds that
moral statements are true or false relative to a particular culture or
society. According to relativism, there are no objective moral facts or
values that hold true across all cultures or societies.

What if one culture clashes with another? For instance, what if a group of people believes that they are morally obligated to have sex with another group who themselves believe that they are morally obligated to maintain celibacy? Both culture's morals cannot both be practiced. At a bare minimum, freedom from association will be required in order to avoid conflict and for moral relativism to work which would make freedom from association an objective standard. The same can be said of moral subjectivism where a particular society/culture is a culture of one individual.

I am unsure about expressivism. Moral beliefs not extending beyond opinion doesn't seem that different from moral nihilism.

>Moral anti-realism has been criticized by moral realists, who argue that
it fails to provide a coherent account of moral language and ethical
reasoning. They argue that moral anti-realism is unable to explain how
moral statements can be meaningful or have any practical implications if
they do not correspond to any objective moral facts or values.

I'll have to side against the moral realists in this case. Although moral statements do have to be objective in order to work (the sex mandate group and the celibates can't both be right), this does not imply that they exist/are_real. Also the existence of language used to describe a given phenomenon does not prove the reality of that phenomenon, other wise the language of faster than light travel found in many sci-fi genres proves that you can travel faster than the speed of light.

That being said, people have desires, wishes, and other preferences. Such preferences take the form of prescriptive type phenomenon. Although these preferences can contradict one another, they can possibly be used to derive a consistent objective meta-preference given the right framework.

What do you think eternal means if not infinitely old? God is omniscient, omnipresent, and eternal. Those are all infinities.

That sounds like an even more windbag Ayn Rand. Doing the holy work for capitalist-realist apologies.

>Labelling (or correctly identifying, words which you may prefer) these identities as constructs does not negate them

It does and does not negate them. Any definition of these identities put forward can be negated and shown to be inadequate.

>These identities as constructs still retain power, they still retain use. They contribute to our collective intersubjectivity.

I fully agree

>is a falsity?

For clarity, I do not think identities are a falsity. I believe that identities do exist. I also believe that God exists. However, I believe that identities and God exist as social constructs; they are social products of the collectivity. I also think identities are beneficial in many ways. As you say and recognize, identities contributes to our collective intersubjectivity by allowing us to understand the other as part of a collective "We" and this is important.

One of my issues with identities is that they are often taken for being fixed objectivities, or in other words, they become for many people reifications. This happens when people make claims such as: "I am what I am". They completely neglect how they are in a process of becoming, that their identity is not fixed but fluid / changing, that their identity exists through opposition to a contrary identity, and that all of this is the result of a historical process.

>I do not think that your real contention with my identities is that they are constructions.

From your last posting, I believe that people are criticizing your usage of identity because you are using it to justify exclusionary practices and unequal treatment. I do not believe that abstract identity categorizations such as "man / women", "American / Mexican" justifies such forms of unequal treatment.

On the contrary, I believe that we need to enlarge our collectivities and attempt to include more and more within a collective "We". All of our particular identities (national, gender, etc. ) exist against the background of this collective 'We', but many people overwhelmingly fail to recognize this background because they are entrenched in their particular identity. The more we de-emphasize the particular, the better we can connect to the universal. There is a pressing need to grow our collective intersubjectivity and encompass more people within our intersubjective relations. Entrenching oneself in one's particular identity is a barrier to this. It sets up an "us vs them" dynamic which is grounded in relations of force.

Sounds like a less eloquent rendition of utilitarianism as explained by John Stuart Mill

So what?

But does it add to it. For example nanalytical (neo) marxism promises a lot but I don’t know what its achievements are