e/acc has solved the "is-ought" problem with thermodynamics!
e/acc has solved the "is-ought" problem with thermodynamics!
Brain genius Beff Jezos manages to butcher both philosophy and physics at the same time!
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For people who don't want to go to twitter, heres the thread:
Doomers: "YoU cAnNoT dErIvE wHaT oUgHt fRoM iS" 😵💫
Reality: you literally can derive what ought to be (what is probable) from the out-of-equilibrium thermodynamical equations, and it simply depends on the free energy dissipated by the trajectory of the system over time.
While I am purposefully misconstruing the two definitions here, there is an argument to be made by this very principle that the post-selection effect on culture yields a convergence of the two
How do you define what is "ought"? Based on a system of values. How do you determine your values? Based on cultural priors. How do those cultural priors get distilled from experience? Through a memetic adaptive process where there is a selective pressure on the space of cultures.
Ultimately, the value systems that survive will be the ones that are aligned towards growth of its ideological hosts, i.e. according to memetic fitness.
Memetic fitness is a byproduct of thermodynamic dissipative adaptation, similar to genetic evolution.
Solving the is-ought problem is super easy when you change what "ought" means.
P=NP if N=1
from the same CS minds who brought you “the solution to the halting problem is trivial, just ask the computer if it halted. hyperturing!”
"This... statement... is... false! (don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it...)"
"Uh, true, I'll go with true."
I dislike how often people pull this trick. 'here are 5 definitions of this thing, we are going to pick one, prove something for it, and claim it also holds for all the other definitions, and never tell people we are working with a non-standard thing'. I get that the goal is to make the non-standard definition the standard, it is activism masking as logic, but eurgh.
Oh god what is most infuriating about this is that he's not necessarily wrong (moral realism👍), he's just getting to it in the most shitheaded way possible with what I have to assume to be the worst possible intentions.
If you’re moral realist he’s even more wrong. Of the realist positions available this is closest to naturalism, but it denies the essential precepts of any moral realism viz. the mind-independence of moral truth. This “is-ought” “solution” is as old as Protagoras, “man is the measure of all things”, where “e/acc’s google-brained account of consciousness” stands in for “man”.
As a philosophical position they’re just doing relativism, and then as a historicised political project this is just late 19th century scientism(ific racism). And I emphasise that the premises (“evolutionary fitness”) reveal the sources reveal the political project.
Moral realists introduce an independent condition (mind-independence) which at least purports to save ethical principles from reducing to “might makes right”, this is just the latter window-dressed with talk of “post-selection” to implicitly let in some degree of ethical deliberation as constitutive of morality, making it incidentally also a cowardly way to propagandise racism.
Oh don't get me wrong, I was trying to save the moral fact baby from the nazi bathwater but I very much agree. It's horrible. If muddled cultural darwinism is the alternative I'll go with Hume anyday.
Edit: I should here add that “utility” as Hume understands it is not yet the full-fledged utility of “utilitarianism” or “utilons”, which innovation is due to Bentham (only a few decades later). For Hume, “utility” is just what you’d expect from normal language, i.e. “use”, or “usefulness”. The utility of things, including principles, is in their being good or bad for us, i.e. not formally in the sense of a hedonic calculus or the satisfaction of preferences (we don’t “count up” either of these things to get an account of Humean utility).
Hume isn’t an anti-realist! The notorious “is-ought” passage in Treatise which people often take for an expression of anti-realism only goes so far as to point out what it says: that evaluative conclusions cannot logically follow merely from fact premises, so that to conclude “eating grapes is good” we also need some evaluative premise “grapes are good” alongside “grapes are red” and “grapes are edible”, or whatever.
Contemporary accounts of Hume are muddled by his long and undeserved reputation as a thoroughgoing radical sceptic, but his philosophy has two sides: the destructive and the reconstructive, where the latter is perfectly comfortable with drawing all sorts of conclusions so long as they are limited by an awareness of the limits of our powers of judgement.
For morality, Hume finds its source in our “sentiments”, but indeed not totally unlike our friend over there, he does not think that this is cause to think our sentiments don’t have force. Again not unlike our friend, he thinks sentiments may be compared for their “utility”. However, his arguments (a) unlike those of our friend, do not attempt to bridge the essentially logical gap he has merely pointed out, (b) unlike the anti-realist, take reflective judgements about utility to have force, alongside the force of those sentiments we reflect on, of an essentially real character.
Insofar as there is a resemblance, the important distinction between what Hume is doing and what our guy is doing is that Hume doesn’t try to find any master-category (implicitly, “the species” above, although e/accs place this underneath another category “consciousness”) which would ground fact judgements in science to give them force. Rather, (a) he basically asks us what else do you plan on doing, if you don’t intend to prefer good things over bad? (b) identifies the particular sources of goodness and badness in real life, and then evaluates them. By contrast, the e/acc view attempts to argue that whatever our cultural judgements are, then they are good, insofar as they are refined evolutionarily/memetically - Hume thinks culture frequently gets these wrong, frequently gets them right, that culture is a flux, not a progressive development, and he discovers the essential truth in looking at individuals, not at group level “selection” over a set of competing propositions.
Hume isn’t tied to the inherent conservatism of a pseudo-Bayesian model. Curiously enough he is a political conservative, which is arguably what makes it possible for him to (lightly) rest his semi-realist account on what he takes to be a relatively stable human sentimental substrate. But this only gives him further cause to take a genial view of the stakes of what we now call “realism vs anti-realism”: it isn’t as important as trying to be nice.