Mage: The Ascension, Technocracy and science

[Endovior]

Here's the thing. I have no way of evaluating or knowing other peoples' brain states. The only 'happiness' I can provably induce is my own. So what if I decided to maximize my own wellbeing, as opposed to everyone's? Why shouldn't I?

Maximizing your wellbeing at society's expense causes society to turn against you. When society turns against you, your wellbeing is minimized. Selfish strategies work only for a few lucky parasites who can be ruined by society at any moment.

That does not follow.

Attempts to improve one's own wellbeing need not come at the expense of another, nor of society as a whole.
It is possible to attempt thus, as a thief or murderer; against such villains is society formed.
But the one who works hard on his own behalf creates his own fortune and wellbeing, depriving no other of anything.

No, he need not have the interests of others in mind as he works on his own behalf.
But that other who claims that he must, that he is wrong to work on his own behalf, that he must serve others as his primary purpose, is as much a parasite as the thief.
What difference, then, between the thief, who takes by force to fulfill his own needs, and the parasite, who demands that society take by force to fulfill his own needs?

If you disagree, then perhaps you believe that a society of parasites is just and moral.
But society needs more than just parasites to endure.
Without those who work hard and produce great things, society has nothing.

[Orion]

Harris isn't JUST a humanist. I have no problem with humanists; I AM a humanist. But, many humanists, myself among them, acknowledge that our belief that "universal happiness of humanity" is good is not a conclusion we arrived at by considering evidence, it's a faith that we inherited by indoctrination.

[LR]

That does not follow.

Attempts to justify selfish behavior based on "working on one's own behalf" fall apart when one takes into account externalities. Self-interest only really works when you already have people who specialize in managing those externalities.

[Username17]

I think that a human saying that making things better for humans is making things more good for humans is in fact a tautology contained in its definitions. You're a human, things being better is more good. Period. Getting upset because someone took that as self-evident is laughable.

-Username17

[Orion]

If you think your moral values are self-evident, you can't simultaneously say that they come from science.

[tzor]

That is true. Rationality and science have few popularizers, and considering that this is a constant battle for the hearts and minds of the youth, there do need to be more people who can promote reason as the basis for society (of course, one of our more vocal board members once vehemently debated against rationality by saying "I don't want a society run by Vulcans", which is a position so crazy I don't know if anyone could ever argue against it).

Unfortunately, Carl Sagans don't grow on trees. Society would be better off if they did.

First of all, if all the later prequels can be considered canon, I'm not sure I want to be "run by Vulcans." They tend to be pretty sneaky litttle bastards at times. Ironically, the person I most admire would be a half Vulcan (or his father who was probably so exposed to humanity that he at least understood human emotions).

I think a certain moron on TV has been babbling about this for the past week. I know a couple of recent Popes have been writing about this as well, one of the books being titled "Faith AND Reason."

One last thought. All systems of reason that use logic are all based at their roots on a set of axioms, items that are simply taken to be true. The real question is where do you draw those axioms. Science is a way of evaluating things from observations. To directly rebutt Orion's statement, "If you think your moral values are self-evident, you can't simultaneously say that they come from science," I refer you to any popular college level physics book. Sooner or later, the author will use the expression, "it is intitutively obvious to the casual observer that ..."

That's just a joke for the expression, "I'd explain it, but it would take 250 hard covered books, four doctoral thesises, and two Nobel science prizes, so I'm not."

[Orion]

As I (who didn't fail intro to philosophy because I never took it) understand the words involved here:

"Science" is forming conclusions by induction from empirical evidence. If your conviction that "universal wellbeing" is the moral good came from science, that would mean that you arrived at that conclusion by examining some kind of empirical data.

A "self-evident" proposition is one that requires no evidence. Therefore, a belief you hold to be self-evident cannot possibly be derived from science.

[tzor]

A "self-evident" proposition is one that requires no evidence. Therefore, a belief you hold to be self-evident cannot possibly be derived from science.

Mr. Webster says, "evident without proof or argument" not without evidence. That the sun rises in the east is self-evident, but that does not mean no one has seen it rise in the east. Oberving the sun rise always in the east can derive the fact but it cannot prove it.

[Xenologer]

The "wellbeing" thing is a pretty basic and ordinary assertion of "my value wins over yours because it subsumes yours and by working for mine explicitly we end up with both." I got a much stronger sense that this was Harris' point than that wellbeing is intrinsically valuable. He does challenge the notion that there would be higher values than maximizing wellbeing wherever and whenever we can, but the main point in its favor is that people already on some level widely accept wellbeing as a good value, with the added assertion that they are correct to do so because, again, it's a good one.

As I mentioned before, most people who are attempting to behave in a "moral" manner are trying to support and work toward this value of "wellbeing." As I also mentioned, people who are working from shitty information (or who don't believe they should have to work from information at all) are just as capable of being wrong about that as they are about health.

Picking "wellbeing" as a widely-applicable value is easy and intuitive because a good case can be made that most people who are trying to be moral are valuing wellbeing already. Then we can use what knowledge we have about ourselves and our world to evaluate our progress toward it. It makes a difference to that progress whether we're working from accurate and useful data, or whether we're having problems getting there due to factoring in totally nonsensical premises backed by shitty (if any) data.

That allows for there to be people who are morally "right" and people who are morally "wrong," because there are means which will do a better job of getting toward wellbeing than others. Those "other" options are morally less desirable simply because from a problem-solving perspective, they don't get us to the value that most of us (justifiably) already have. This means there are "wrong" moral positions just as there are "wrong" positions about medical treatment or any other problem-solving situation.

Reiterating: Harris makes it quite clear that there would have to be multiple, even mutually exclusive, ways of making good progress toward our value, and therefore there are multiple ways to be morally "on the right track," just as there must surely be multiple ways to have it all wrong.

Yes, you have to assume something at the start. If that invalidates a position, I suspect we're going to have to completely overturn the very idea of logical proof. However, this particular humanist position ("wellbeing=good") doesn't require any more of a heinous, difficult, or tenuously-supported assumption than for health professionals to assume at the start that "health" is good.

[Orion]

Again and still, I have nothing against "making some assumptions at the start." I have objections to attempts to obscure the assumptions being made.

I, as a utilitarian humanist, have chosen to assume that human wellbeing is the highest good. My Utilitarianism proceeds from this assumption. In his TED talk, Sam Harris asserted that I had erred--that assuming wellbeing to be good wasn't necessary, because science could provethat well-being was good. He then failed spectacularly to justify himself.

[Xenologer]

I don't recall that from the TED talk, but it's been a lot longer since I watched that than it has been since I cracked open the book (which was happening last night). If the best he had to offer was in the TED talk, then you would have completely eviscerated the point he is making, but he says more than that in the book, and the extra stuff he said is a lot more solid (and I'm not going to recap it for a third or fourth time or however many times it's been at this point).

tl;dr: I agree with you that that'd be a pretty weak reason to accept his value, so it's a good thing that there's more to it than that, as I have already stated.

[Username17]

If you think your moral values are self-evident, you can't simultaneously say that they come from science.

No. The point is that things being better being more good is self evident. Everything else that can be valued can be held up to rigorous examination. You can't meaningfully question if things being better is actually worse, because that's simply a contradiction of definitional terminology.

Your complaint is every bit as valid as worrying that geometry isn't a scientific discipline because you can't define the word "between" without falling back on circularity. Human language is simply incapable of breaking down farther than word "between" or "better". So claiming that taking those words as axioms negates scientific reasoning is exactly like denying the existence of logical examination in all circumstances.

-Username17

[Vnonymous]

The dumbest argument against rationality and self interest that I keep seeing is people saying

"hurrrrr if you act in self interest you offend society and end up worse off" which is fucking moronic, because acting in self interest includes thinking about what the rest of society is going to do! If you can gain a buck to make the entire world want to murder you then it isn't in your fucking best interest to take that dollar.

The "vulcans" argument is similarly dumb - it thinks that rationality is silly because it does not take emotions and instincts into effect, despite the fact that a rational system does, by definition, take them into effect when working out the best course of action.

Please don't post them any more in this thread.

[LR]

The dumbest argument against rationality and self interest that I keep seeing is people saying

"hurrrrr if you act in self interest you offend society and end up worse off" which is fucking moronic, because acting in self interest includes thinking about what the rest of society is going to do! If you can gain a buck to make the entire world want to murder you then it isn't in your fucking best interest to take that dollar.

There are real people who actually believe that "self-interest" means acting like a sociopath. They rationalize that belief by expecting everyone else to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Those are the people that the argument is targeted towards. If you want to complain, complain to the people who label their own selfishness as rationality.

[Orion]

Is pain bad? How bad is it? How about death?

Suppose you're given a choice between a life of constant extreme pain and a death. Which is preferable? To answer that, you have to do more to assume that "better is good." You have to make some unprovable assumptions about the values of life, pain, and so on. We're not talking about pain being good or bad *for* anything. You can test the effects of pain on learning or whatever else. You can empirically verify how much good or ill you are doing to society. But what is the significance of your life and consciousness, in itself? How bad is pain, beyond its effect on your ability to do things?

Philosophers have argued about this for ever, and they will argue about it forever. Science will never and can never tell you whether pain is bad, or how bad it is.

[Xenologer]

Science will never and can never tell you whether pain is bad, or how bad it is.

Pain and suffering are things which occur in our minds, which impact our psychological, emotional, physical, etc. health. There is no human experience so spiritual and ephemeral that it cannot be measured (either in actuality right now, or in theory with the technology we'll develop). The value judgement on it is harder, but I hope you're not trying to argue that the conscious experience of human beings is beyond the power of science to evaluate.

As far as making value judgements on it, what you seem to be arguing is that Harris is wrong about the ability of scientifically-acquired knowledge to evaluate which choices are better for individual or social wellbeing. Yes, wellbeing itself is a value that must be accepted, but once we accept a value all we are doing is problem-solving.

I see no reason why empirically-acquired knowledge would be any less useful for determining which choices optimize our wellbeing than it is for determining which choices will be best for our health. Mistakes may be made, and the definition of the value itself may be tough to pin down, but that doesn't mean the process or value itself is not seriously the best we've got. I still think it is, and you haven't offered any real clash to that other than your repeated assertions that we can't actually prove that things which are bad for us are bad.

[norms29]

There are real people who actually believe that "self-interest" means acting like a sociopath. They rationalize that belief by expecting everyone else to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Those are the people that the argument is targeted towards. If you want to complain, complain to the people who label their own selfishness as rationality..

It sounds like your trying to claim you misunderstood, or Endovior spoke in a manner which invited misunderstanding... in which case, you're a moron

you responded to this

Attempts to improve one's own wellbeing need not come at the expense of another, nor of society as a whole.
It is possible to attempt thus, as a thief or murderer; against such villains is society formed.
But the one who works hard on his own behalf creates his own fortune and wellbeing, depriving no other of anything.

with this

Attempts to justify selfish behavior based on "working on one's own behalf" fall apart when one takes into account externalities. Self-interest only really works when you already have people who specialize in managing those externalities.

so either you were hallucinating and responding to a totally different thing that you thought Endovior said, or YOU are one of the people who, as you put it, "actually believe that "self-interest" means acting like a sociopath."

do you really believe that any behavior which benefits the self must nessessarily come at someone elses expense? or are you just equivocating the two to try and trick people?

[quanta]

The assumption that people maximize wellbeing is either fairly weak (in that you're only stating they try to maximize the shit they like the most) or just plain wrong (not everyone agrees on the relative rankings of various goods, and people will certainly come into conflict over resource allocation even when the question is just how much to allocate to who, not about screwing other people). The problem is that there's no good scientific measure of whether it's better to have X than to have Y. There's no universal scale to objectively measure the "goodness" of various things like a lower disease rate, higher education, "happiness", etc.

Trying to derive a system of ethics or morality from science based upon maximizing well-being is probably fruitless. The closest related mathematics is probably game theory, which already fails as being consistently a good model for how humans should act, because they will behave fundamentally irrationally no matter how you try.

On the other hand, something like evolutionary game theory can give you some idea of why particular moral or ethical codes, forms of cooperation or cheating, etc. have survived and what strategies might dominate them.

Basically, if you specify a ranking of various goods, services, and emotions, and how much weight you should place on providing that to a particular person, then in theory you may be able to compute how to maximize that measure. But people are going to disagree on the axioms about what to maximize. The axioms are basically what constitute morality in many people's point of view anyways. It's not that everyone agrees on what is good and just disagrees on how to go about it.

And wellbeing is too fucking amorphous to serve as the axiomatic thing to maximize anyways. You need to be able to deliver an actual numerical scale of what needs to be maximized, that you can get almost everyone to agree upon.

[Xenologer]

The problem is that there's no good scientific measure of whether it's better to have X than to have Y. There's no universal scale to objectively measure the "goodness" of various things like a lower disease rate, higher education, "happiness", etc.

You're right. No branch of science in all of recorded history has indicated even slightly which things are good for us, and even if we knew those things, there is no way to prove that things which are good for us are good for us, it must just be accepted that "good for us" is equivalent to "good for us." Thank God you came to explain this to us, because Orion hasn't been unsuccessfully making the very same case for several posts now and it definitely needed to be reiterated.

And wellbeing is too fucking amorphous to serve as the axiomatic thing to maximize anyways. You need to be able to deliver an actual numerical scale of what needs to be maximized, that you can get almost everyone to agree upon.

You should tell all those doctors out there that working for the "health" of their patients is too fucking amorphous to be worth their time.

[MGuy]

I think you're twisting quanta's intent. Lets take the health thing. Most people want to be healthy with a few people here and there perhaps wanting to be sick to get out of school/work. We can all agree with that. But what we can't agree on is whether or not we want all other people to be healthy. Some people have rational reasons for wishing ill will on others while most others might have irrational reasons for desiring the same. However the main point is that while we all want ourselves to be healthy we all do not necessarily want everyone else to be. From here there will arise conflicts over the health issues. Be it selfishness (as with this public option issue), ignorance (discrimination based beliefs), or other miscellaneous reasons (religious reasons for denying medicine) people will argue over things that seem fundamentally good. Science has no way of measuring people's tastes.

[Xenologer]

Morality as a matter of personal taste is probably fairly defined as "moral relativism." Even if it's not moral relativism that you're expressing, there's still something very interesting about comparing, "I prefer other people to be less healthy" with "I like sprinkles on my ice cream."

(Insert everything I've already posted two or three times about how most people who claim to have a moral system are valuing wellbeing in some way or another.) Given all that stuff I'm too lazy to copy-paste (and which the people who are actually reading my posts are probably sick of reading over and over), we can evaluate rationally and using evidence whether people's choices are getting them closer to that goal. This opens up the possibility that people can be wrong on those "moral" (which I've repeatedly said is just problem-solving once a goal is set) questions as they can about questions of how to treat cancer. There may be many right and many wrong answers, but that doesn't mean there are none.

I mean, treating cancer with homeopathy is quantifiably wrong, and not just because somebody somewhere gets off on being irradiated and therefore has a personal preference for any treatment which involves it. By the same token, there are ways of working toward general and/or personal wellbeing which are just as demonstrably wrong (such as throwing acid in the faces of girls who try to go to school), because we know that they don't achieve the goal.

[quanta]

You're right. No branch of science in all of recorded history has indicated even slightly which things are good for us, and even if we knew those things, there is no way to prove that things which are good for us are good for us, it must just be accepted that "good for us" is equivalent to "good for us." Thank God you came to explain this to us, because Orion hasn't been unsuccessfully making the very same case for several posts now and it definitely needed to be reiterated.

Don't be a fuckwit. Also, keyword there: universal. Talking about maximizing well being isn't fucking science. And knowing that it's better to not have cholera than to have it isn't the issue. The problem is with comparing things that aren't on the same scale to start with. Like "is it better to have a high paying job or a satisfying one?" Or "Would people be happier with less if other people did more thinking for them?"

Anytime you go out to measure something like "freedom" you're forced to make a bunch of arbitrary choices as to how to assign numbers to various aspects of it. Yet you can't just ignore that shit, because people demonstrably value something even when they can't agree on what the fuck it is.

You should tell all those doctors out there that working for the "health" of their patients is too fucking amorphous to be worth their time.

And I repeat. Don't be a fuckwit. Many doctors need only treat patients on an individual basis. They don't have to worry that treating Ms. smith's cancer will affect little billy's chicken pox. And even within a single patient, you usually don't have to worry that treating someone's back problems will cause them to develop liver problems. (Surgery risks infection, but you still only need advise the patient as to the risks and then have them make the choice). 99% of problems are easily measured as binary choices like "Is it better to have cancer or not?" Very little science needs to be done in defining health because almost everyone in Western society can tell you immediately what state they'd prefer to be in health-wise. Fuck, I'll even be nice and ignore the fact that Doctors don't actually practice science. They apply things from science sure, but they don't actually do science. [EDIT: That's incoherent, what the fuck am I smoking?]

Any not shitty system of scientific morality ought to do something far more difficult, which is choose how to allocate resources between various things which are all good for well being, but not necessarily equally so. And then you need to remember that people are competitive animals who are honestly less happy with 150,000 dollars living with neighbors who make 200,000, than with 100,000 dollars living with neighbors who make 50,000 dollars. It wouldn't even be unexpected to find that when you apply science to your axioms you find the most moral government might do shit like randomly select various children to get different amounts of subsidy for their schooling.

You keep saying "BUT IF WE AGREE ON A VALUE WE CAN TRY TO MAXIMIZE HOWEVER DIFFICULT IT MIGHT BE!" Yes, and I already agreed on that point,

Basically, if you specify a ranking of various goods, services, and emotions, and how much weight you should place on providing that to a particular person, then in theory you may be able to compute how to maximize that measure.

Unfortunately, your chosen value is not well defined enough for a starting point because you will have to make trade-offs. Even more unfortunately, morality largely consists in choosing the axioms, so you're pretty much screwed. I mean, just for fun, how the fuck do you choose the correct moral value of behavior towards risk (risk-averse, risk-neutral, etc.) or shit like the discount rate of future goods/happiness? These parameters obviously matter, but there isn't any clear empirical or logical way to choose what values are most moral.

EDIT: Just for fun, I may even go make a toy model of something like ethical allocation of resources. I'll be pretty surprised if I don't get different answers for what's moral behavior depending upon parameter values that basically can't be set except in a somewhat arbitrary manner.

If I don't get any such variances, I guess you get +1 or something.

Also, the problem with different people having different moralities is that when they conflict, you're now out in the cold in determining who behaved morally.

[Xenologer]

Already repeated a bunch of times my assertion that most people who claim to be acting on morality are already valuing wellbeing as they understand it. However they define "wellbeing," it's what they want. This is an argument you could fairly dispute, but nobody has actually really bothered.

I've also already repeated that these understandings of "wellbeing" are in fact statements about what is good for people, which is something that the scientific method as applied by a whole horde of scientific disciplines does a better job of defining and evaluating than basically any other paradigm out there. If you disagree, feel free to suggest an alternative.

I think the disconnect here is that you're forgetting that things which are knowable in principle (AKA things with a "correct" and "incorrect" answer) are not always currently known in fact, and that we can make reliable conclusions from incomplete knowledge. This latter part is especially important, and deserves elaboration.

Example: We cannot actually make a list of all wishes people have made this year while blowing out the candles on their birthday cakes any more than we can state all of the possible ways of achieving wellbeing. That doesn't mean we can't make statements of truth based on our admittedly-incomplete knowledge. For instance, it's definitely untrue to say that all of this year's birthday wishes were for advances in the development of solar-powered electricity generation, were generated by the firing of precisely 100,000 neurons, and were all made in Latin. We don't actually have to have all the data to be able to rule this out, any more than we have to have run all the calculations to start ruling out certain behaviors, customs, and mores as being absent from our list of ways to achieve wellbeing. We know enough about ourselves and our world to start doing this, even if we don't have a finished model or set of models. I'm not sure why that's so controversial.

[K]

Don't be a fuckwit. Also, keyword there: universal. Talking about maximizing well being isn't fucking science. And knowing that it's better to not have cholera than to have it isn't the issue. The problem is with comparing things that aren't on the same scale to start with. Like "is it better to have a high paying job or a satisfying one?" Or "Would people be happier with less if other people did more thinking for them?"

Actually, science does have answers for the first at least. Happiness maxes out at 60K a year (in the US, at least). Having less money than that means that people report more unhappiness and having more shows that their happiness flatlines.

These really are questions that science has answers for.

http://industry-news.org/2010/06/04/dan ... ear-video/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36149893/ns ... -behavior/

Those are just a google search away. I think you'd be mightily surprised at just what science can tell use that philosophy and religion can't. Heck, go to Newscientist and search up "happiness" for the layman's version of happiness research; the results will astound you.

[Orion]

Self-reported happiness in Brave New World would be off the charts. Not everyone is convinced that's the same thing as well-being.