olin posted:

These absurdities with the infinite do not exist with spiritual beings.

olin posted:

The hotel argument points out the absurdity of infinite material things. If the hotel has infinite rooms and they are all occupied and then a new customer comes the manger can still except new guests. He has infinite rooms. Everytime a new customer comes and can give them a room and move tenet in room 1 to room 2 an room 2 to room 3 etc. Even though every room is occupied he can always except new customers. And even though new customers are checking in he always has the same number of customers. Infinite. 1000 more check in, still the same number of customers. Even if an infinite amount of new customers can he could still accommodate all of them. and he would still have the same number of customers.

Now everyone in rooms with even numbers checks out. Guess what he still has the same exact number of customers; infinite.

The argument goes on and on but you get the point. An actually existing material thing is full of absurdities. It cannot exist.

Who What Now posted:

Ok, then how to do go from this to the Christian God specifically?

olin posted:

Thats what I'm trying to research now.

spoon0042 posted:

Is this one of those things we're supposed to just accept as true by definition like that "everything good is God" bit?

olin posted:

Demonstrate an example like the hotel argument about eternal spiritual being.

olin posted:

Demonstrate an example like the hotel argument about eternal spiritual being.

Brainiac Five posted:

I am a devil and here to do the devil's work, for all you know.

You seem to not understand what empiricism means, though.

doverhog posted:

In the absence of perfect knowledge you use the best available.

Brainiac Five posted:

You can't get a loving observation from statistical manipulations. Idiot.

doverhog posted:

Why are you so hostile?

Juffo-Wup posted:

It seems like you're arguing that we are totally in the dark as to what makes people feel pleasure and what makes people feel pain, or even how to discover the answer to that question. Is this your position?

Brainiac Five posted:

What in the actual gently caress.

Juffo-Wup posted:

I am trying very hard to determine what your position is, and I'm finding it difficult. I swear it's in good faith. My task is made harder when you post stuff like this rather than an actual response to the substance of my comments. I'm getting that you're frustrated with the direction this conversation has taken, but not much else.

If you don't want to talk about it, just say so.

Brainiac Five posted:

No, I'm stunned that a post where I said that sensual pleasures are not the sum totality of pleasure is taken as "we cannot measure pleasure or pain in any way". I was hoping you weren't a total pinhead.

Juffo-Wup posted:

Yes, but this is a blunting of the verificationist sword - you can no longer say that certain statements about metaphysical states of affairs are meaningless full stop, you can only really say that you are unwilling to accept the axiomatic system under which they are meaningful. Which is more Carnap than Ayer; not nearly as flashy, because you can't go around telling people they're fundamentally and systematically mistaken about what they think they mean when they speak.

That is, it is not the positivists reliance on the principle of verification that is a problem, it is their insistence that it is the only justifiable axiom.

rudatron posted:

The people I don't get are the atheist moral realists, which according to that poll posted, is definitely something that exists in philosophy departments. Why bother? The creation of moral realism was there to save the idea of god from the problem of evil, absent god you no longer need moral realism. I think people just like the idea of their morals being 'objective', because they're taught that subjective = bad and objective = good, which is important for theories of knowledge, but a bad way to think about ethics.

Zaradis posted:

And this is why you have no good reasons for telling other people they ought to also like the color orange. And since you claim that your moral beliefs are of the same type, the same is true for your moral beliefs. If you have no grounds for holding others responsible based upon your moral beliefs then morality falls apart. The point of morality is the ability to claim that one ought to act a certain way. If we have no logical grounds from which we can tell others what they should and should not do then there is no such thing as morality. This is the OP's point.

rudatron posted:

I also think you can solve the problems of utilitarianism if you think of pleasures/enjoyment not as a continuous metric, but as an infinite ordered set of satisfied desires. You can starve 1 to feed 100, but you can't make 100 content by starving 1 - the 'addition' is in different dimensions, and the 'hunger' dimension takes priority over the 'entertainment' dimension. Of course, that reduces some of the appeal of utilitarianism, by getting rid of a single metric of 'utility' that everything can add or subtract from, and you have to go through the hard work of deciding the ordering of those desires, but that classic simplification is what introduces the problems of the utility monster in the first place. Keeping your terms separate is probably for the best.

rudatron posted:

The people I don't get are the atheist moral realists, which according to that poll posted, is definitely something that exists in philosophy departments. Why bother? The creation of moral realism was there to save the idea of god from the problem of evil, absent god you no longer need moral realism. I think people just like the idea of their morals being 'objective', because they're taught that subjective = bad and objective = good, which is important for theories of knowledge, but a bad way to think about ethics.

rudatron posted:

I also think you can solve the problems of utilitarianism if you think of pleasures/enjoyment not as a continuous metric, but as an infinite ordered set of satisfied desires. You can starve 1 to feed 100, but you can't make 100 content by starving 1 - the 'addition' is in different dimensions, and the 'hunger' dimension takes priority over the 'entertainment' dimension. Of course, that reduces some of the appeal of utilitarianism, by getting rid of a single metric of 'utility' that everything can add or subtract from, and you have to go through the hard work of deciding the ordering of those desires, but that classic simplification is what introduces the problems of the utility monster in the first place. Keeping your terms separate is probably for the best.

Elukka posted:

Oh, there's an excellent reason for everyone to act a certain way - no society can exist without a shared moral base on the broadest level. Now, the continued existence of humanity and society is not an objective good either, but humans including me unsurprisingly tend to agree it's a subjective good. A lot of subjective beliefs are shared by most people and are very important to us but in the end they're not really any more objective than liking a color. My conclusion that they are not objective doesn't make them less important or valid to me.

Any argument that concludes that morality doesn't exist is patently false as all people indeed hold morals, whether they have any supposedly objective basis for them or not.

Zaradis posted:

Subjective morality clearly exists, that's true. But it provides no grounds from which one can hold others morally accountable. If our subjective moral beliefs clash then there is nothing to be done because neither of us are right or wrong since there is no objective basis from which those moral beliefs can be judged. Shared subjectivity does not make it any less subjective. That your subjective beliefs are important does not give you any right to hold others accountable according to those beliefs. Holding others accountable for your subjective moral beliefs is just as absurd as claiming that everyone ought to like the color orange because you like the color orange. The point is not that morality does not exist as a concept, it's that if morality is only subjective belief then no one is in any position to hold others morally accountable, which is the entire point of morality.

I very much doubt the existence of a higher power from which we can obtain objective morality. So the problem of subjective morality is a problem for me as well. But pretending that it isn't a problem does nothing to solve it, it merely makes you (seem?) delusional. The idea that subjective beliefs can hold sway over others is pretty much the basis of totalitarianism.

Juffo-Wup posted:

Can you explain what you mean by 'objective,' and how a higher power, if it existed, would give us a moral theory of that sort?

Zaradis posted:

In my opinion there is no such thing as true objectivity.

Zaradis posted:

I very much doubt the existence of a higher power from which we can obtain objective morality. So the problem of subjective morality is a problem for me as well. But pretending that it isn't a problem does nothing to solve it, it merely makes you (seem?) delusional. The idea that subjective beliefs can hold sway over others is pretty much the basis of totalitarianism.

Zaradis posted:

In my opinion there is no such thing as true objectivity. What we call objective is simply the agreement of many subjectivities. However, if the universe has an infinite creator it would seem that creation would be an objectively real thing. That creator would also be responsible for creating morality since it created everything and thus morality would be objective. Infinity is a difficult concept for human beings to wrap our heads around, but I think one way of explaining what I'm trying to say is that an infinite subjectivity would be objectivity by virtue of its infinite-ness.

Juffo-Wup posted:

Sure, okay, but unless you tell me what meaning you intend that word to have, I can't know what it is you think doesn't exist.

Like, here a pretty naive reading: objective facts are facts about things (objects, if you like) in the world. Subjective facts are facts about individuals' experiences of those objects.

But this, or anything like it, probably isn't what you mean, because it entails that there are no facts about the world. Most people would take this as a bad result. So I assume it's gotta be something else, but what?

Zaradis posted:

In my opinion there is no such thing as true objectivity. What we call objective is simply the agreement of many subjectivities.

Elukka posted:

It's also the basis of all society ever. I don't see why it's a problem. Certainly having an objective truth makes an issue easier to resolve, but having one is a want, not a need. We can, always have and always will function with shared subjective morality.

Elukka posted:

I don't see how the existence of a creator would give rise to objective morality. What if the creator didn't care or understand such things? If the creator simply caused the universe and took no part in it since then, how would that provide you an answer on why it's wrong to kill? A creator does not need to have created morality like they'd have to have created time and space, because morality is an emergent property of our brains, not a fundamental property of the universe.

What if the creator did take an active part in things, and claimed moral rules that are utterly disagreeable to most of us? Why would its moral rules necessarily be better?

Zaradis posted:

Please don't take my words out of context. I told you exactly what I believe objectivity is. The nature of experience is entirely subjective, and since experience is all that we can possibly know, feel, be aware of, etc. then if objectivity exists we cannot know it. We cannot know facts about things in the world, we can only know facts about our experiences, but that it seems that we experience things outside of ourselves does not mean that we actually do (i.e. Kant). This is simply the nature of subjective experience, and when a bunch of them agree on something we call it objectivity because it's more comforting to believe that we know something objectively than accept that we can't.

Most of us are naive realists about the objective world for practical reasons, but logically there is no bridge to get from subjective experience to objective reality. So to borrow your words, subjective facts about an individuals experiences are all that that individual can know by the very nature of subjectivity and experience.

Juffo-Wup posted:

Okay, yeah sure: universal radical skeptics have ground for refusing to assent to any objective theory of ethics. But it also means that you are barred from assenting to any conclusions from e.g. the natural sciences. I suspect that if a moral realist gets an interlocutor to agree that moral facts are on the same epistemic level as physical facts, they'd count that as a win.

Juffo-Wup posted:

Second edit: in fact, you can't even get intersubjectivity from your position, since your don't think you know other people exist. You're advocating solipsism.

Zaradis posted:

I would not call holding to the logical conclusions of subjective experience "radical", since it is a logical necessity.

Bully for moral realists. So what? I'm not concerned with winning an ideological war against moral realists.

Juffo-Wup posted:

'Radical' in the sense of "All knowledge is illusory, pull it up by the root!"

Anyway, logical inference hours two ways and your modus ponens is my modus tollens. I tend to think that if out turns out that some philosophical position leads to the conclusion that nobody knows anything, that counts as a reductio against that position. The a priori insistence that nothing can be known is a surefire way to shut down a conversation. Like, I could reply to any post in D&D (or SAL even) saying "You don't know that! Nobody knows anything!" And it would be about as interesting and relevant as it is here.

But, you know, Duhem-Quine and 'come what may' and all that. The most I can do is show that your premises lead to something ridiculous, but if you are determined to accept that conclusion anyway, there's not really anything I can do. Oh well. (Though I suspect you will not have the courage of your convictions, and will, at some point, claim to have knowledge of something).

Zaradis posted:

I never claimed that nobody can know anything and I've already claimed that I know things. I don't doubt that other people know things too. We all have a great deal of subjective experiential knowledge. That is the only type of knowledge that we can have. And when many subjectivities agree on what counts as experiential knowledge we call it objective knowledge.

I think that the external world exists. I think there are things in the world which correspond to my experience of those things. Can I know that with any logical certainty? No. That's simply a fact. Do I believe that knowledge doesn't exist simply because a logical bridge between subjectivity and objectivity is not possible? Of course not.

First Guess posted:

We can know facts, even facts about objects, but those facts aren't objective, since we can't be certain about them.

Second Guess posted:

We can know facts, but not facts about objects, only facts about our conscious experience. So we have knowledge, but not objective knowledge.

Juffo-Wup posted:

Wow, I'm having a hard time figuring out what it is you're saying. Let me know if I'm still missing the mark:

First Guess posted:

We can know facts, even facts about objects, but those facts aren't objective, since we can't be certain about them.

Is that a fair rendering of your position? Because if it is, it looks very much like you're mistaking certainty for objectivity. Alternatively:

Second Guess posted:

We can know facts, but not facts about objects, only facts about our conscious experience. So we have knowledge, but not objective knowledge.

This doesn't involve a terminological confusion, but it does entail solipsism. Because on this account what you know is something like "I am presently having an experience as of someone talking to me," but you absolutely do not know anything like "Someone is presently talking to me" or even "That, over there, is a person." You might think that we infer the latter from the former, but that we lose certainty along the way. So we know that 'This is a person' but we aren't certain about it. But this is the same conclusion we got from the first guess: we have fallibile objective knowledge. To deny that this is really objective knowledge is, once again, simply to confuse certainty and objectivity.

So it looks like your position either depends on a terminological confusion, or else it entails solipsism.

Finally this is all ignoring the fact that whichever of these positions you're prepared to endorse, the problem you're pointing out isn't unique to moral facts; it generalizes to all knowledge. If the most you can say about knowledge of moral facts is that I can be no more certain of it than I am that I have two hands, then that looks like a pretty weak argument against moral realism.

Juffo-Wup posted:

Finally this is all ignoring the fact that whichever of these positions you're prepared to endorse, the problem you're pointing out isn't unique to moral facts; it generalizes to all knowledge. If the most you can say about knowledge of moral facts is that I can be no more certain of it than I am that I have two hands, then that looks like a pretty weak argument against moral realism.

Juffo-Wup posted:

Wow, I'm having a hard time figuring out what it is you're saying.

the trump tutelage posted:

Couldn't you then contort any "utilitarian" argument to individual ends based on how you order those desires? Why bother with the contrivance of utilitarianism at that point?

Juffo-Wup posted:

rudatron posted:

All moral systems are contrivances, I guess is the point. But that's okay