How do you measure that, though? Even today, people will advocate death and torture of their perceived enemies. Are they evil? How many people need to believe something is evil before its objective?

Considering OP's title, it might just be binary.

Maybe I've read too much gnostic literature. I thought the moral of that story was that knowledge itself is a fall from paradise because ignorance is bliss, and you can never reclaim innocence once it's lost.

Good and evil are definitely not subjective. If the only evidence of harm exists in one person's qualia, no one would call it "evil." If it's called "evil," that means it's gone beyond subjective experience into something that can be measured objectively, like deliberate torture or genocide.

We can call them relative, but even that's a triviality as almost everything is relative. "Evil" is essentially that which is harmful to life, and is ranked according to its perceived necessity (e.g., killing for survival). At the most, you could say that these perceptions are subjective, that evil isn't wrong, or that it doesn't exist, but that doesn't tell us about what evil is. And that's something we can do whether we believe in evil or not, similarly to how we can say an action is "wrong" in a certain religion or ethical philosophy we don't subscribe to.

Ultimately, everything has some kind of objective value whether we can immediately perceive it or not. Object and subject are relational frameworks.

It's almost as if morality is inherently subjective and a product of the human experience...

Hi, are you me? I've often said pretty much the exact same thing! It's so common that people love to put things in little binary boxes, when it's so rare to actually be that clear cut in the real world. It's a useful mental shortcut sometimes, but also often goes too far and is treated as a fundamental truth rather than just categories for aiding our understanding of the world! Really nice to see someone expressing the same sentiment, even using some of the same phrases as I often do when describing it 🙂

Same misreading of Plato found in her prior attempts to write about it. Can’t even tell us the name of the dialog. When a student writes that Plato condemns writing in the Phaedrus I know they didn’t even read the dialog. When a student writes that Thoth speaks for Plato I know they didn’t come to discussion (and didn’t read the dialog). But when a digital studies celebrity writes it they are doing philosophy in the New York Times.

Fair point, the tree of knowledge (imo) seems to extend beyond just good and evil though, and may even refer to a heightened state of consciousness where we are aware of our actions (ie having a conscience and other attributes)

We should keep in mind that this is a myth. You may take what message from it you like, I suppose. I'm sure there's more than one thread of meaning in there. I agree that it wasn't about 'knowledge' in general at all. It was about 'the knowledge of good and evil' and our inability to judge good and evil because of our limited mortal understanding. (This aligns with the later observations that 'we know not what we do', 'judge not, that ye be not judged', etc.) Thus the stricture enjoining them to not eat of that fruit, eh? If it was about obedience and control, any kind of tree would do for the story, I would think...the tree of really tasty cookies perhaps...'Don't touch' thunders God. 'Those are my cookies!' Instead, the tale specifically refers to the knowledge of good and evil. Every time we declare an enemy to be evil, as they declare us to be, we taste that fruit: war and conflict and the loss of paradise.

To the person doing the punching, its probably not evil.

Good and evil are subjective views, but we use consensus morality to impose laws. This is where moral ambiguity becomes moral code.

BTW, I agree punching babies is evil. But thats my subjective view.

The sin wasnt about knowledge, it was about breaking the rule.

"You disobeyed. So you are cast out"

Yet another form of control.

Interesting example. A US POC flags a WW2 nazi as evil, even tho nazism didn't explicitly target POC (unlike Jews, Roma and Slavs). According to the debate, this automatically makes the opponents of nazis good. That forces the US POC to root for a camp that is still actively lynching, segregating and in many ways targetting the POC.

A great practical example is Jessie Owens, who by all accounts was significantly better treated at the Olympics by Germans, then by his own country.

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Let the humans ask the questions, let the bots answer them. As god intended.

Everything is useful if used correctly but people...

This reminds me of chess cheating… I think it would be more reliable for the cheater to just Google answers than to use GPT in that case tho

We been hazeled it appears.

Wait, I just hazed myself. Can one do that?

Must google...

I also hazel too long.

You're welcome...

Yes, in person. But people are using the toilets and sometimes plant cellphones there. Difficult to spot this. I work as a teacher btw..:)

Aren't exams usually held in person? And for things like term papers can the AI really structure everything perfectly to have thesis statements, arguments and evidence laid out and cited properly?

Yeah, obviously it needs to be included in lessons. However, in exams it’d become problematic. I asked the AI about panopticon structures in Focault’s theories and it spat out a perfectly fine definition.

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to your own feelings.

all morality is rooted on ones emotions.

but its fine.

I haven't had much experience with the technology but surely it isn't that easy to get a good result, from what I've seen the AI spits out obvious BS if only infrequently and such problems would be easily seen by any careful teacher and penalized with a bad grade. Why not just make it permissible for everyone? That way it's fair game to use it, the playing field is even, and students who genuinely care are still going to turn out much more thoroughly proofread work than someone who submits lousy copy pasted material