let's not waste more time down that path, it's just symantics in my view.
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If the GRE needs a common-sense interpretation, are you saying that you need reason to apply it correctly?
Yes.
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Why did it have to be an extremely simple meme? People in the "old days" were just as intelligent as we are.
I thought I stated clearly that in my view the reason was so that it could be easily propogated by word-of-mouth. I hypothesize that that is less important in the Internet age.
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Can we agree that trying to find a more logically pure GR statement is a worthy goal and a candidate for the first virtue, one that would trump arguments based on reason that came to a conclusion inconsistent with this "verbose Golden Rule"?
Can you agree that Empathy should clearly be stated as something that trumps reason that contradicts it; i.e., as the first Virtue?
I don't think so. There is no order to the virtues, they work together.
Reason without empathy leads to bad results and so does empathy without reason. How is one more important than the other?
Because reason alone doesn't provide any kind of moral compass without some kind of moral axioms to reason from. It's an axiomatic system, like arithmetic. Your question is like asking, "why can't you have arithmetic based on reasoning of equal weight with the axioms?" Well, in a sense they might be considered to be of equal weight. But that's symatics. You can say that reason is MORE important if you want. But the construct built with reason is built upon the axioms.
I think the new religion must in effect be an axiomatic system because there is no way to make moral arguments purely from ungrounded reason.
So, you can say that reason is the same importance as the moral axiom(s) if you want, but the construction must be grounded in something that is not demonstrable by reason, and if reasoning processeses lead to conclusions that contradict the axioms, then it must be assumed that there is an error in the reasoning (or that the axioms have built-in contradictions that absolutely must be resolved).
Can you agree that Empathy should clearly be stated as something that trumps reason that contradicts it; i.e., as the first Virtue?
I don't think so. There is no order to the virtues, they work together.
Reason without empathy leads to bad results and so does empathy without reason. How is one more important than the other?
Because reason alone doesn't provide any kind of moral compass without some kind of moral axioms to reason from. It's an axiomatic system, like arithmetic. Your question is like asking, "why can't you have arithmetic based on reasoning of equal weight with the axioms?" Well, in a sense they might be considered to be of equal weight. But that's symatics. You can say that reason is MORE important if you want. But the construct built with reason is built upon the axioms.
I think the new religion must in effect be an axiomatic system because there is no way to make moral arguments purely from ungrounded reason.
So, you can say that reason is the same importance as the moral axiom(s) if you want, but the construction must be grounded in something that is not demonstrable by reason, and if reasoning processeses lead to conclusions that contradict the axioms, then it must be assumed that there is an error in the reasoning (or that the axioms have built-in contradictions that absolutely must be resolved).
Do you disagree?
[Jake] I'm not sure what you mean either, as per David's question, but I will take a stab at this anyway and attempt a disagreement. I do think I see a few lines of reasoning here that deserve criticism.
First the belief that a system of reasoning must have "axioms". From the various ways I have heard this word used, I assume we mean a set of assumptions. A set of some sort of "prereason" positions which our very being here to think about it presume. I call this kind of thinking foundationalism. It has a few good things to say for itself, and many rational thinkers operate from such a foundational position.
But to think that rational thinking requires foundationalism presents a point that pancritical rationalism takes issue with. Pancritical rationalists argue instead that rationalism as a process occurs contingently, or "in the middle of things". We can name common axioms, however we commonly discover that different starting assumptions can converge on similar reasonable positions through a process of rational criticism. Hence one's "axioms" may as easily prove a simple byproduct of historical happenstance, instead of any actual central necessity to living a rational life.
The conceptual difference lies in that a pancritical rationalist holds all representations in principle subject to rational criticism. Perhaps some representations become circumstantially more important, and hence we recognize this by calling them "axioms". But that does not in principle exempt them from rational criticism either should the issue reasonably arise.
You say reason must have "grounding", and "axioms". Perhaps it does have that, but the more distinctively reasonable moments can occur when we choose to become more contingent, and when we can more comfortably question our axioms as well.
As for our place in this, I too come down on the side of empathy playing a coequal role with reason. Reasonable people respect the role that empathy plays in their capacity to function both as a society and as individuals within a society. Our capacity for empathy provides us both with necessary information to function socially as well as moral compass, itself fully subjectable to rational criticism. Because of this very relationship between reason and empathy, humans can appreciate things like the golden rule in a context of reason as easily if not more easily than they can appreciate it as some supposedly supernaturally derived edict. And certainly empathic people can recognize that that with reason their empathy goes farther and does more than if they otherwise squander it unreasonably.
Love,
-Jake
« Last Edit: 2003-01-10 13:37:55 by Jake Sapiens »
[not quoting jake but responding to his message above]
Your position may make sense from a rational point of view, I'd have to think about it a lot more. But to me that is a question of academic, not practical, importance.
Plato's philosopher-kind idea is sublimely rational. But it doesn't work in the real world because of the danger of choosing the wrong person, the lack of practical means of reliably causing the right one to come into power. Hitler was arguably a philosopher-king and certainly many or most Germans were convinced that he was the man for the job. But they were confused. He wasn't Plato's ideal (to say the least).
Similarly, a reasonable-sounding meme that is very destructive can, and often has been, confused with correct reasoning -- as happened with the idea that "nature is not merciful in its rightful and good process of allowing the strongest and best to rise to the top, so we shouldn't be either; therefore we should suppress our feelings of empathy and kill the Jews anyway."
If we don't have the empathy-golden-rule-whatever-it-is meme as the top dog, there will always be the danger of that process being repeated, as it has been many times in the past.
For me this is purely a practical problem. When I talk about axioms, etc. I am just trying to explain my point of view in very exact, rational terms. But as your message implies, life is so complex that a purely rational discussion of moral guidelines can come to practically any conclusion depending on who is involved and what their prejudices are. That's precisely why we need the GR or Empathy meme as the top dog. Reason is tricky. Life is too complex for reasoning about it to be known to be correct. It is too easy to mistake compelling irrational memes for reason.
But the Golden Rule gives a very simple guideline: "If I don't want to be sent into a gas chamber, I shouldn't do it to someone else". There is really very little way to be confused about that, given the structure of the Golden Rule. I admit that the GR is, as David has pointed out, imperfect. But I continue to think that it has evolved in a parallel way in numerous philosophies and religions precisely because it really does give a powerful protection against that the kind of thinking that leads to such disasters, and I continue to feel that it is probably hubris to think we can do better...
BUT what should probably really happen is that we create a long and awkward-sounding, but nearly perfect, top-dog empathy virtue, and let the simple expression of it evolve over time, as long as it is consistent with the top dog virtue.
Here's something I'd like to do: either break off the Golden Rule vs. Empathy debate into another thread or drop it for now.
I think we have established (with David's help) that the GR can't stand on its own as the one and only axiom of morality. OTOH I continue to think it should probably be the foremost one, although perhaps in its negative form "Do NOT do unto others what you would NOT have them do unto you".
But if we set up the technical substrate for an evolving memetic religion properly, the best formulations should be allowed to evolve to be the most compelling ones that are consistent with our detailed "commandments" or "axioms", which might be very verbose and boring. We should let the community evolve the exact expression of the low-level, highly-propogatable memes. (I strongly suspect that the GR will evolve as a prime one as it has done over and over and over and over in the past.)
Let's call this meme-complex which I think needs to be top dog, Empathy.
So I'd like to put the specifics of that meme complex aside for now or have an academic debate about it, for amusement, in another thread.
But what I really, really want to see happen is that have a mechanism that precludes the kind of reasoning that led to the holocaust. In that case REASON WAS EXPLICITLY USED TO OVERRIDE EMPATHY: "Nature is merciless and the best prospers in nature. Therefore we should be merciless and ignore our feelings of empathy for the millions of people we kill in the service of our ideas".
We NEED to make sure that THIS religion doesn't become a tool for that kind of thinking due to causing too much faith in the very-very-fallible process of human reasoning. The idea that reason should have equal power would make sense to me if it were possible to
a) RELIABLY reason correctly about these issues, which it simply is NOT; and
b) if there was really a strong reason to believe that reason alone could provide moral guidelines so strong that they should be allowed to trump empathy when somebody "reasons" that they should, as the Nazis did. I see no way that reason can provide such guidelines.
Unless empathy EXPLICITLY TRUMPS REASON, I currently see no way around this possibility. I am open to other suggestions, but my point is that at the very outset of a memetic relgion taking off there must be virtues that are crafted so that Nazi-like thinking will not trump empathy; analogously to the way the U.S. constitution protects us against many bad possibilities.
Hmmm.... I don't know how formally or exactly you mean that question, but I'll loosely say Yes.
If you're using the term in a very different way, it would be helpful for us to clarify our terms.
Reason is a very sophisticated game of abstraction. The game pieces consists of bits of knowledge, variously known as propositions, statements or sentences. Some pieces describe the state of the world, e.g. "nine planets orbit the sun in our solar system". Some pieces describe the pieces used to describe the world (definitions are an example). Some pieces, called conditionals, describe the world as it could be. Some pieces called goals, describe the worlds as it should be.
Other pieces, the ones that make this the game of Reason, describe how to manipulate all the pieces in a valid way. These rules are also part of the game, which makes it self-referential like the game of Nomic. The rules are used by the players to tell how pieces can relate to each other, and how to generate new pieces or remove existing pieces from the game.
All the pieces, in addition to encoding some knowledge, have an associated truth value that reflects our confidence in the veracity, validity, probability, etc. of the piece. The truth value is used for consistency checks and generating new pieces. Truth values also change when related pieces change.
The pieces are arranged in a network of implications. The rules define what the implications are, a simple example is: if there is a piece X with truth value t, then there is another piece not-X with truth value (1-t). When you are playing the game, you can use that rule to create the 2nd piece (if it doesn't already exist) or alter the truth values of the pieces when one of them changes.
Now there is much(!) more to be said on this topic. I am just clarifying these ideas in my own mind as a direct result of this thread (thanks, garyrob). Hopefully this sketch will give you some idea about how I see Reason being much larger than the rules of inference. Sort of like how there is vastly more to the game of chess than the rules of how the pieces can move. But even to compare it to chess is an understatement. The whole field of mathematics is a subset of Reason. The whole enterprise of science is a subset of Reason.
My use of "reason" includes yours as well, with the possible exception that I don't see a need to spend a lot of effort defining it in that level of detail right now. I don't think the degree to which we nail down the word "reason" will make much difference to the success of the new religion in propogation or in being more moral than other religions.
I studied the foundations of logic in college, I'm familiar with godel's theorem, etc. These are interesting areas to me as a curious person.
But I keep coming back to the fact that in the real world, certain meme-complex can evolve to SEEM to many or most people like valid reasoning, and which are not valid reasoning, and which cause holocausts to occur. (And again, I'm not even sure that it matters whether the reasoning is valid or not if there are not explicit moral axioms that the reasoining proces must start from.)
I don't see to much value in a new religion unless it provides a framework for dealing with this. The reason I am excited by memetic religion is that I think it can do better. I don't want to be involved in just one more tool for the evolution of effective hate memes.
I don't believe the Church of Virus has a protective framework, because to say "reason and empathy are equal" will mean in the real world that hate-oriented meme complexes will be hosted within the religion (IMHO). "Christians can't stop proselytizing Christianity; they are too infected with it. And Christianity has caused destruction all through history. Reason therefore says that for the greater good, we need to kill all unrepentant Christians. Yes, empathy is supposed to be equal to reason, but it isn't MORE than reason. If it was MORE than reason, empathy would trump in this case and we couldn't kill the christians. But since neither trumps, we have to do what seems right according to our understanding of the overall pros and cons. And that is to kill the Christians."
The above example is NOT absurd, at all, if you have studied Nazi thinking.
If hope the CoV will come to address that; I am motivated (obviously) to try to help it happen.
I think it's important to see hate some meme-complexes as evolving in such a way as to imitate reason; to SEEM reasonable, while in fact being ungrounded in morality and/or logically fallacious.
There is selection pressure for this.
With regard to hate memes, people feel unhappy and desperate. They want someone to blame. But they can only blame somebody else if they can THINK they can justify it with reasons. (Certainly this was very true of the Nazis.) So, a meme will propogate if it satisfies the desire to rationalize hate, and part of what it has to do to succeed is SEEM like reason. It will not propogate if it doesn't do that.
So over time these memes evolve to be highly effective at mimicking reason.
Just saying "reason is a virtue" does nothing to address this; in fact it strengthens the power of such memes (IMHO). If enough people can't tell the difference between the hate meme and actual reason, and reason is supposed to be good, hate memes will be likely prosper at least as well as in, say, Christianity (IMHO).
As a separate point, I think it is arguable that without an empathy-based axiomatic system from which the reason must start, even CORRECT reasoning is as liable to be part of a hate meme as an empathy meme (in the real world where people get satisfaction from hate).
I believe we CAN fix these problems from the outset and that's what I am proseletyizing for.
I don't believe the Church of Virus has a protective framework, because to say "reason and empathy are equal" will mean in the real world that hate-oriented meme complexes will be hosted within the religion (IMHO). "Christians can't stop proselytizing Christianity; they are too infected with it. And Christianity has caused destruction all through history. Reason therefore says that for the greater good, we need to kill all unrepentant Christians. Yes, empathy is supposed to be equal to reason, but it isn't MORE than reason. If it was MORE than reason, empathy would trump in this case and we couldn't kill the christians. But since neither trumps, we have to do what seems right according to our understanding of the overall pros and cons. And that is to kill the Christians."
OK, let's say that someone advocates killing Christians and backs it up with the argument above. We think it is a bad idea, and want to convice them that it is a bad idea. What is the better approach and why?
1) Your argument is fallacious for the following reasons... 2) Your conclusion breaks the golden rule, which supercedes reasoning.
Re:Unreason: a meme you need
« Reply #73 on: 2003-01-08 13:00:27 »
I've noticed you have mentioned Nazis in most of your messages. I'm curious about how you would apply the golden rule if you encountered Nazis. Would you treat them how you would like to be treated yourself? Conversely, if you don't want to be stopped from pursuing your own agenda, would you give them the same courtesy?
The question you raise "how would you treat Nazis" is one I have had in mind to bring up all along, but I have felt that it was premature. I still do; I think dealing with it is a 2nd-level task. If we can't settle on the 1st level there is no reason to go there. I do have ideas about how to handle it, but it is challenging, and a distraction until the 1st level is dealt with (I think).
The first level can, I think, fairly be represented as follows:
IF we can find a way to deal with the conundrum you point to within a system that OTHERWISE has Empathy as the first virtue, explicitly trumping Reason, such that it would innoculate against reason-mimicking hate memes, would you then agree that we should build the system that way?
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