MAGIC SOOUULLLSSSS Libertarian

[name_here]

That is a descriptive statement and not an ethical system. They are different.

For one thing, you have not proven that extinction is bad and survival is good. You don't get to handwave that and call it obvious; if you say ethics are inherent in the universe you must prove that from fundamental laws.

[Occluded Sun]

For one thing, you have not proven that extinction is bad and survival is good.

I've demonstrated through argument that systems of thinking in which those positions are taken eventually become the only ones. The universe is not neutral towards applied ethics, it actively discriminates.

If you have two people, one of which believes he can fly if he jumps off a cliff and one that believes he'll die and should avoid doing that, and you let them act... are you seriously telling me that the survival of the second and death from falling of the first doesn't make the first's beliefs invalid and the second valid?

[momothefiddler]

Things that try to survive are more likely to survive than things that don't. Therefore survival is objectively good.

No, entities that have traits that result in their survival end to accumulate. Entities which value their own survival persist and increase their numbers, compared to entities which don't - they go extinct.

Why is it right for bees to build six-sided cells? Sure, it's a more efficient use of space and resources, but why should "more efficient" be better? Ultimately, it's because efficiency leads to survival, and the bees whose genetic instructions lead to survival dominate. That's what makes that behavior 'better'.

Apply the reasoning to beliefs. Subject A thinks plunging red hot spikes through his eyes is a terrible idea. Subject B thinks it's a great idea! Leave them alone to do as they please, and pretty soon B is dead. Instead of a field averaging out to neutrality, the population's preferences are skewed towards no-hot-spikes. What a surprise!

Things that survive, survive. I agree! You continue to make your tautological point! And then, without any sort of link, you jump to the assumption that better at surviving is better ethically. The guy who died is supposedly proven wrong - bad, even - by virtue of having died, but at no point have you shown your objective reason to think that being dead is bad. Apparently "being alive" equates to "being right about what's good" - or at least "being alive with no living detractors". I can't understand why you're arguing politics, then, though. You can't consider any political stance better than any other at that point, except the ones that aren't around any more, so there's no-one 'wrong' to argue with until they're dead.

If you have two people, one of which believes he can fly if he jumps off a cliff and one that believes he'll die and should avoid doing that, and you let them act... are you seriously telling me that the survival of the second and death from falling of the first doesn't make the first's beliefs invalid and the second valid?

Ah-ah-ah! Don't try to sleight-of-hand conditionals/causal relations in here. The whole point of the argument is that logic can handle those (and only those). "Flying" and "not dying" are your 'what to aim for' here, and it can be demonstrated that neither of those can be achieved by jumping off a cliff. Because you have assumed that "flying" or "not dying" are "good", you can determine from that that jumping off a cliff is not good.
Outside that assumption, none of this means that flying is moral, or that dying is bad, or that cliffs should be eradicated. It's purely if-then. If you jump off the cliff, then you die. Your actions from there are based on how you value death.

[Occluded Sun]

Things that survive, survive. I agree! You continue to make your tautological point! And then, without any sort of link, you jump to the assumption that better at surviving is better ethically.

I would feel more sympathetic to you if you weren't ignoring the link I provide, over and over again.

Why is it that people who believe they can throw themselves off cliffs and fly are rare? For the same reason bees make hexagonal cells in their hives.

Nature discriminates between ideas of what's valuable, of what's better. It causes certain types of ideas to cease existing. That's the link. A person who really did think it would be good to cease existing regardless of circumstances in some ways is just as correct as someone who believe the opposite. They could generate and hold that belief, just as the opposite can. It's not impossible to hold. If you take on either viewpoint, either perception seems correct. But if you view the situation across time, instead of at a single point in time, that belief stops being held. It goes extinct. Eventually there are no anti-existence people to take the perspective of. Only pro-existence perspectives.

That is what makes the pro-existence stance objectively correct, just as hexagonal cells are the correct way for bees to build.

Because you have assumed that "flying" or "not dying" are "good", you can determine from that that jumping off a cliff is not good.

No, I haven't made that assumption. If we presume they are otherwise normal people, though, it IS implied. Why is that?

What if we only look at the flying aspect. Let's say the fall isn't a lethal or even injurious - it's just not flying. Without evolutionary selection, what distinguishes a person who believes they can fly (and can't) and one who believes he can't fly (and can't)? Sure, the one whose beliefs are inaccurate would probably keep trying to fly and not accomplishing anything. In the absence of survival-related consequences, though, it's pretty hard to explain why anyone should care about whether their beliefs are accurate.

The "dying is good" perspective can exist. Briefly. But over time, it ceases to be, and eventually it's not there any more. It ceases to be an available perspective.

[name_here]

Nope. You're still missing an explanation for why a belief system that stops existing is worse.

Also, you are in fact critically mistaken. Virtually all modern ethical systems value something above personal survival.

[Occluded Sun]

Nope. You're still missing an explanation for why a belief system that stops existing is worse.

You're still missing the explanation (in the sense of "it's going over your head"). The field of potential perspectives is restrained by the operation of the universe - over time, it narrows. The viewpoints that say that existing is better than not are the ones that are there for us to adopt. No one who actually practices the opposite is still around for us to take the point of view of.

Also, you are in fact critically mistaken. Virtually all modern ethical systems value something above personal survival.

1) For that point to be correct, I would have had to argue that personal survival is the only thing... which I didn't.

2) It would also have to be the case that "what most modern ethical systems value" is relevant. It isn't. It doesn't make the least bit of difference what people do and do not think. If ten billion people disbelieve in gravity, does that matter more if ten billion believed fervently?

[Maj]

If you have two people, one of which believes he can fly if he jumps off a cliff and one that believes he'll die and should avoid doing that, and you let them act... are you seriously telling me that the survival of the second and death from falling of the first doesn't make the first's beliefs invalid and the second valid?

Validity doesn't matter.

People who prefer certain thoughts and ideas over others translate the events of history in that light. No matter how many times the economic theory of austerity is demonstrated to be a bad idea, people who believe in it won't ever accept that it's the cause of failure. To relate it back to your own example, they will deny that the cause of death was impact with the ground and keep pushing people off the cliff, hoping they learn to fly.

[Occluded Sun]

Validity doesn't matter.

In a discussion of what's objectively correct... well, that's precisely what 'valid' means. It's just a different word to describe the same concept.

Duh.

[name_here]

You're still missing the explanation (in the sense of "it's going over your head"). The field of potential perspectives is restrained by the operation of the universe - over time, it narrows. The viewpoints that say that existing is better than not are the ones that are there for us to adopt. No one who actually practices the opposite is still around for us to take the point of view of. 

Doesn't work like that. First, you literally cannot destroy a possible perspective. Even if all evidence is totally erased, someone new can think of it again. Second, we actually totally have records of the beliefs of groups that committed mass suicide.

2) It would also have to be the case that "what most modern ethical systems value" is relevant. It isn't. It doesn't make the least bit of difference what people do and do not think. If ten billion people disbelieve in gravity, does that matter more if ten billion believed fervently?

By your metric, modern ethical systems must be the best because they persist.

[momothefiddler]

Things that survive, survive. I agree! You continue to make your tautological point! And then, without any sort of link, you jump to the assumption that better at surviving is better ethically.

I would feel more sympathetic to you if you weren't ignoring the link I provide, over and over again.

Why is it that people who believe they can throw themselves off cliffs and fly are rare? For the same reason bees make hexagonal cells in their hives.

Nature discriminates between ideas of what's valuable, of what's better. It causes certain types of ideas to cease existing. That's the link. A person who really did think it would be good to cease existing regardless of circumstances in some ways is just as correct as someone who believe the opposite. They could generate and hold that belief, just as the opposite can. It's not impossible to hold. If you take on either viewpoint, either perception seems correct. But if you view the situation across time, instead of at a single point in time, that belief stops being held. It goes extinct. Eventually there are no anti-existence people to take the perspective of. Only pro-existence perspectives.

That is what makes the pro-existence stance objectively correct, just as hexagonal cells are the correct way for bees to build.

Things that try to survive are more likely to survive than things that don't. Therefore survival is objectively good.

People who try to climb mountains are more likely to be on top of mountains than people who don't. Therefore mountain-climbing is objectively good.

People who attempt to take away your stuff or freedom or life are more likely to take away your stuff or freedom or life. Therefore theft, slavery, and murder are objectively good.

Now, if you take a random sampling of people, you'll probably find that some people place a lot of value on being on top of mountains, while others place little value on being on top of mountains. Some probably even assign that negative value! And at first glance, it appears that both beliefs are valid. But if you sample people who live on mountaintops, instead of randomly, you can see that the anti-mountaintop perspective is all but gone.

That is what makes the pro-mountaintop stance objectively correct.

Because you have assumed that "flying" or "not dying" are "good", you can determine from that that jumping off a cliff is not good.

No, I haven't made that assumption. If we presume they are otherwise normal people, though, it IS implied. Why is that?

What if we only look at the flying aspect. Let's say the fall isn't a lethal or even injurious - it's just not flying. Without evolutionary selection, what distinguishes a person who believes they can fly (and can't) and one who believes he can't fly (and can't)? Sure, the one whose beliefs are inaccurate would probably keep trying to fly and not accomplishing anything. In the absence of survival-related consequences, though, it's pretty hard to explain why anyone should care about whether their beliefs are accurate.

Because logic is useful for accomplishing goals, even if those goals aren't survival? I mean we program guided missiles to take inputs and modify their behavior based on them in order to more efficiently destroy themselves, essentially. Granted, their goal is defined by us, based on our goals, which are often related to survival, and at no point am I claiming any of this is moral or immoral. Just an example of caring about accurate beliefs in the absence of survival as an end-goal.

The "dying is good" perspective can exist. Briefly. But over time, it ceases to be, and eventually it's not there any more. It ceases to be an available perspective.

Yep. And you'll find more pro-mountaintop people on mountaintops. But this is merely a causal relationship. It doesn't make anything "good".

2) It would also have to be the case that "what most modern ethical systems value" is relevant. It isn't. It doesn't make the least bit of difference what people do and do not think. If ten billion people disbelieve in gravity, does that matter more if ten billion believed fervently?

Actually yeah, by your claim that perspectives can be correct by nature of being near-universally held, it matters a whole lot if ten billion people disbelieve in gravity.

[Kaelik]

The field of potential perspectives is restrained by the operation of the universe - over time, it narrows. The viewpoints that say that existing is better than not are the ones that are there for us to adopt. No one who actually practices the opposite is still around for us to take the point of view of.

Over the span of the universe the field narrows. Eventually the viewpoints that will still exist will be none of them at all, because no one at all will be alive anywhere in the universe.

Therefore it must follow that all beliefs are equally wrong.

[nockermensch]

Reality operates upon entities, and to the degree that those entities behave according to ethical beliefs, reality operates upon ethical systems. It's no different than any other aspect of behavior. Ethical systems that lead to their own self-destruction are, after sufficient time and abrasion, no longer present.

Existence doesn't make statements. It does effectively make judgments, though.

Oh wait, are you by any chance a naive believer in pop positivism who believes that societies "evolve" towards a nicer direction? Because if so, I'd direct your attention to the surge of Wahhabism in Islam and how America's public opinion about torture did a turn from "unacceptable" to "well, it depends".

It's true that systems like societies, cultures and institutions compete for finite resources and so must evolve. But in a lot of cases, this evolution is towards meaner, more ruthless forms, as demonstrated again and again by opening a History book or turning on the news. And as North Korea has demonstrated, going full 1984 on your people is a thing that works.

It's terribly naive to believe that better ethical systems will win because reality will pick them over the nasty ones. In a purely hypothetical situation where the bad guys have a lot of money, they could, say, give billions in funding to people who preach divine mandate ethics to children, and to think tanks that put forward the idea that freedom matters more than equality. And then they'd win. (hypothetically speaking).

[Maj]

Validity doesn't matter.

In a discussion of what's objectively correct... well, that's precisely what 'valid' means. It's just a different word to describe the same concept.

Duh.

You really want it to be important, but when they're trying to explain the world through their lens of interpretation, humans don't care about valid. They want their way to be right, they don't want to choose the "valid" way.

Thought experiments are awesome - choosing ethics that are more valid than others sounds great - but reality disagrees with you, which is why validity doesn't matter - humans won't choose it if they don't agree with it.

[Username17]

Thank you, Frank. I had no clue there was a legit thing called "negative liberty." It explains a lot about American political parties.

Remember always that Negative Liberty is itself basically a shell game. An excuse to ignore negative consequences on the common-use "liberty" of poor people from implementing policies that they like. Sure, not having health insurance means that you're unable to leave your job for fear of bankruptcy and death, but escaping wage slavery "doesn't count" because that's just positive liberty. The only liberty that matters for that discussion is the negative liberty of not having a government mandate to have health insurance.

But remember: that's all a shell game. For anything that they do like, the whole distinction of negative/positive liberty goes out the window straight away. Consider, for example, Contracts. Contracts are the societal enforcement of agreements. That means that contracts are a positive liberty (the ability to make an enforceable agreement) at the expense of negative liberty (the ability to break your agreements without consequences). If the Libertarians were at all serious about their distinction between negative and positive liberties, there's no way that they could accept contracts. The fact that they are pro-contracts gives the game away.

Anyway, I'm pretty much done with Occluded Sun. He is apparently the missing link: an Atheist Divine Mandate proponent. He claims that his views are correct because they are going to win. And he knows they are going to win because... faith in his views. It's sort of interesting, in that if someone made exactly the same arguments for Christianity or Islam they would be treated as "not insane" because those views are so common. But because he's using exactly the same chain of logic from an equally fervent flame of devotion to an obscure and unpopular political philosophy, his madness is totally obvious to everyone.

But while that's an interesting and demonstrative point, I have no desire to continue the conversation. It's exactly as productive as confronting a fundamentalist Muslim about the contradictions of their beliefs.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

Occluded Sun's argument is an incredibly weird mix of "I do not understand natural selection" and "the is-ought problem is less a problem and more a way of life."

He seems to believe that natural selection will act upon ideas in order to converge on a specific set of ideas which are correct. That's pretty much total bullshit. Let's borrow an example from biology: the dioversity lost during mass extinction events comes back as existing organisms branch out to fill the empty roles. There is no tendecy to converge. In order to get such a convergence, you have to make a bunch of hidden assumptions - i.e. "people will stop having new ideas," "old ideas won't come back from the dead like zombies," "ideas really do battle eachother highlander style because there can be only one!!1!" None of those assumptions hold up.

But it's even worse than that, because he's assuming that a single, stable set of answers exists in the first place. More biology: life on earth evolved the ability to synthesize vitamin C, and natural selection approved. Then simians evolved the ability to not do that anymore, and natural selection approved again. That is the same question with two completely different answers - because natural selection only operates with respect to a given environment, and environments are not static. The world is fucking complicated and it changes in response to you as you change in response to it. There is no reason to believe that "the natural selection of ideas" is even capable of producing consistent answers to begin with, and every reason to believe it will bounce all over the place with a bunch of random noise thrown in.

But even more questionably: why the fuck would you worship what is essentially a genetic algorithm? Computer scientists have been studying those for half a century, and we are well aware of their flaws and limitations. They search for local optima, not global optima. The difficulty in getting a genetic search algorithm on top of a hill of shit to notice the mountain of chocolate right next to it is well-documented. Even if a process of iterative selection such as the one he's imagining produced a final answer, there would be no reason to believe that it had produced the "most survivable" answer. Because math.

So that leg of the argument is completely fucking stupid because Occluded Sun doesn't actually know anything about the concepts he's borrowed to substantiate his beliefs. But the other leg of the argument is completely fucking insane. He's arguing "what will be, ought" - a variation of the is-ought problem embraced as a guiding philosophy and based in the future. That way, when you remind him that it is currently legal to rape your wife in parts of the world, he can just say "sure it is now, but it won't be in the future, and when it's no longer legal anywhere, that'll prove it oughtn't be." And then if raping your wife ever becomes legal again somewhere, he'll just say "that last time wasn't really the future, it just looked like the future. It will be illegal again eventually, and when it is, the inability of the idea to survive will prove it oughtn't be."

But even after that, it's still begging the fucking question. He has yet to explain why what will be ought to be - i.e., to justify the transition from descriptive statements about the future of the universe to ethical statements, which, despite his bitching, is still a wholly unsubstantiated leap upon which his argument rests.

[Occluded Sun]

But even after that, it's still begging the fucking question.

All you've done is demonstrate that you don't know what that phrase means.

[RadiantPhoenix]

All you've done is demonstrate that you don't know what that phrase means.

Begging the question means "assuming the conclusion (of an argument)", a type of circular reasoning. This is an informal fallacy where the conclusion that one is attempting to prove is included in the initial premises of an argument, often in an indirect way that conceals this fact

[Username17]

But even after that, it's still begging the fucking question.

All you've done is demonstrate that you don't know what that phrase means.

Listen asshole: people mixing up "begging the question" and "raising the question" is indeed a personal pet peeve of mine. People do it all the time while trying to sound smart, but it makes them look stupid and calls their argument into question.

However, what you are doing is literally begging the question. You are stating your conclusions and then backing them with premises that are simply identical to your conclusions. That is a "circular argument" or "begging the question." Really. In most cases when people accuse each other of begging the question they actually mean that there are unaddressed points, but you really are begging the question. And flapping your arms about how people don't know what the phrase means will not help you here. Because people fucking do know what the phrase means, and it perfectly describes one of the shitty arguments you've been trying to make.

Fuck!

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

But even after that, it's still begging the fucking question.

All you've done is demonstrate that you don't know what that phrase means.

Dunning and Kruger would like to have a word with you. That word is "stop."

Your are asserting that "what will be is what ought to be." People are challenging you to justify that assertion. Your justification is "because it is what will be." That is begging the question. It's not confusing, it's not complicated, and it's not even remotely difficult for anyone whose head is not up their ass to spot. Your inability to recognize it for what it is is an embarrassing mix of ignorance and overconfidence. But the good news is that, as someone too stupid to realize they are exactly as stupid as everyone else thinks they are, your ego is probably not in any real danger.

[nockermensch]

But even after that, it's still begging the fucking question.

All you've done is demonstrate that you don't know what that phrase means.

NOT PICTURED: Any attempt to answer the criticisms levered at your weird religion.

Speaking of your weird religion, at least they managed to get a nice temple here in the city. It's decrepit now, because everybody else thought the guys were a bit crazy and I think the World Wars must have been a rather severe blow to people who claimed that scientific progress would make bad things go away forever. They also have a site that wasn't updated in this century yet but there you go.

[Occluded Sun]

NOT PICTURED: Any attempt to answer the criticisms levered at your weird religion.

The 'criticisms' leveled (not 'levered') at my arguments (not religion) generally don't have anything to do with the arguments. In those rare cases when they do, they're trivially incorrect.

As I said before, I am disappointed in the quality of posters here. There are few things as satisfying as an intelligent, witty argument with excellent points and insults. That's not going to be happening in this thread, it seems, and it's definitely not going to be happening with these posters.

In truth, I'm somewhat at fault. I know better than to expect quality from people outside my intellectual weight class. I should stick to talking with people whose IQs are less then forty points below mine.

[name_here]

There was an underflow error on that test, I take it.

[Kaelik]

NOT PICTURED: Any attempt to answer the criticisms levered at your weird religion.

The 'criticisms' leveled (not 'levered') at my arguments (not religion) generally don't have anything to do with the arguments. In those rare cases when they do, they're trivially incorrect.

If that were true, you would not have difficulty demonstrating it. So again. How does "Things that exist for a long time or propagate their existence tend to exist longer than things that don't meet those criteria" allow you to claim:

My right to property is [exists].

[Username17]

There comes a time in every Libertarian's argument where they just give up and stop trying when they happen to run into people familiar with their brand of bullshit. ISP passed that point long ago, and now Occluded Sun has passed it as well. At this point, he's literally picking out typographical errors in posts and using them to claim massive intellectual superiority as an excuse for why he doesn't have to provide any evidence at all for his extraordinary claims.

In real life, the last refuge of the scoundrel is a declaration of faith and/or patriotism. But in internet discussions, truly the last refuge of the defeated is to ad hominem their opponents based on the stupidity supposedly demonstrated by typos.

We've simply reached that part of the Libertarian argument: the part where they run out of bullshit and flail around insulting people. We started with the claim that Libertarianism was logically derivable from unquestionable axioms, and then we got to the massive history failure, and now here we are. A better informed Libertarian would have taken us through a lame attempt to claim that Libertarian policies would provide the greatest good for the greatest number and a slippery argument about how surrendering an arbitrary subset of liberties to government necessarily ends in Hitler or Stalin or something. But Occluded Sun's quiver emptied pretty fast because he doesn't actually know all the arguments for his own position. Which is kind of sad, because there are only like half a dozen that the Libertarian faithful are asked to memorize and regurgitate.

-Username17

[nockermensch]

NOT PICTURED: Any attempt to answer the criticisms levered at your weird religion.

The 'criticisms' leveled (not 'levered')...

Whoa, autocorrect fail here. Sorry.

... at my arguments (not religion) generally don't have anything to do with the arguments. In those rare cases when they do, they're trivially incorrect.

As I said before, I am disappointed in the quality of posters here. There are few things as satisfying as an intelligent, witty argument with excellent points and insults. That's not going to be happening in this thread, it seems, and it's definitely not going to be happening with these posters.

In truth, I'm somewhat at fault. I know better than to expect quality from people outside my intellectual weight class. I should stick to talking with people whose IQs are less then forty points below mine.

Still missing from your hilariously patronising reply is you posting youtube videos and german pages that totally agree with your points and promising to totally show your work and prove us wrong, tomorrow. You just keep doing this thing where you ape an intelligent and reasonable person manner of writing, but because the actual meat of your arguments is 150 years old religious insanity, you're not fooling anybody here.

That, or you're just trolling. Actually, I think I'd be happier if that's the case. For your own sake, I hope that before each reply you have to decide if it's already the time to post RUSEMASTER.JPG or if it's worth to reel us in for a bit more.