Great podcast! Great book by David Edmonds too! Parfit's second book helped me sort out puzzles I couldn't get my head around many years ago when I was halfway through my masters thesis defending a form of moral realism and became persuaded by the other side. Inconvenient! I found Parfit's arguments for moral realism in On What Matters convincing, and wish his deep conceptual analysis and clever reasoning had been available to me way back then. He was a philosophical genius - a major influence in the retreat of moral anti-realism in contemporary philosophy.
Very interesting topic indeed. Here's a poem I wrote in 2021. She looks at the screen (Based on the thought experiment by philosopher Derek Parfit) She steps in the pod And looks at the screen The scanner turns on And wakes the machine Her destination Now flashes in green The scanner has read The scanner has seen A button is pressed The doorway shuts clean The choice has been made There's nothing to glean Save for the message "Begin the routine- Replicate atoms- Accept every gene-" The penny then drops On this horror scene She cries in distress Outside is serene Then it's all over The cruelty, the mean Her copy sees Mars While she's never been.
Does anyone think that morality talks can ever move the needle of the population that simply doesn't care how they treat others, a/o doesn't care to understand ? Dendrites in "the human mind can justify anything" brains are more fixed than we'd like to admit. Even the idea that "creating enemies is not a good survival strategy" doesn't transform those that can't or don't value how they treat others.
Science fiction has a neat trick that throws up these philosophical questions, recently watched “Counterpart” which was fascinating in that it touches on this psychological continuity.
@@PlayNiceFolks did you look for the cassette tape? I still think there may be some esoteric clue on that. I was disappointed Peter Quayle’s character wasn’t fully explored. J. K. Simmons was mesmerising. Then there was the depiction of an epidemic, predating covid… A whole lot more too. I guess it didn’t attract the audience it deserved. I ponder sometimes if science fiction writers are failed philosophers, or is it the other way around?
Boy, was that conclusion repugnant! Good one, reminds me of 'The Deplorable Word', a chapter title in the Narnia series. Fascinating topics actually, I must find a copy of Reasons and Persons...
Imagine we have perfected the teleportation of inanimate objects; that we can disassemble and reassemble an object's atoms and molecules perfectly, so that the only difference is the object's location. So then we teleport a human, say a 35 year old volunteer prison inmate. We put him in "telepod" A and reassemble him in telepod B. What if the teleported volunteer in telepod B shows up with the mental and physical abilities of a newborn, essentially a 35 year old infant? Do we really know enough about consciousness, memory, and personality to assume that making a perfect copy of a person's brain will make a perfect copy of everything that makes the person who they are?
We probably do. In your example, a "perfect copy" would be an atom-for-atom identical arrangement to its, um, progenitor. So far as we understand the universe at the present moment, we have no reason to believe that there is anything more magical than the properties that emerge as a result of atomic arrangement. Complex as though it may be what patterns have eventually emerged, there is nevertheless simply no evidence (yet) of any 'mind' beyond matter. That said, if it turned out that those who step out of telepod B end up having, well, 'problems,' I wouldn't be surprised. Whether we know _everything_ about matter is one question, but whether there really is mind magic beyond matter is another. I feel comfortable in my doubt for both.
@@pocket83squared Theoretically, then, if we can duplicate, or even improve on the human brain with AI, then we should see true, self-aware, self-motivated consciousness. I don't think that'll happen, but it remains to be seen. I'm not imagining magic, or supernatural, just thinking that consciousness is not well understood. The rapid progress in AI will tell us a lot.
@@sarahtonin4649 Will it? The rapid progress in AI sure will tell the AI a lot; you and I are stuck being biological (pardon the assumption). If I'm being honest with you, I'm not so sure that the biological version _is_ bona fide consciousness. I know, I know, it's self-evident and self-affirming and all that, and to have made the assertion at all is to've already established the fact for oneself, right? That's what I used to think, but I've been stuck on this topic for an inordinate amount of time now, and I'm really starting to think of my mental experience as being a sort of mimicry of what a _real_ omni-directional consciousness would entail. Seems there are sort of levels to it-degrees of resolution-and I'm not entirely convinced that mine is so finely crafted. Something that's capital-C Conscious would be aware of both states of experience simultaneously: that of telepod A, _and_ that of telepod B, and further, it would also encompass an awareness of every conceivable continuity extant between the two, as well as be in possession of an understanding of every disjoint. In comparison, we 'conscious creatures' really do function like 2-d 'copies' of a 3-d thing. And why is it a surprise? Our minds were crafted by evolution to be environment-prediction machines; we are only experiencing in-head simulations of what's real. Is our calling it consciousness not hubris?
@@pocket83squared I suppose it depends on how we define consciousness. Is consciousness merely the ability to perceive and react or respond? A machine can do that, but is it aware of doing that? Is consciousness the same as awareness? Sam has quoted Thomas Nagle -- that a creature is conscious if there is "something that it's like" to be that creature. At the end of his essay The Mystery of Consciousness he says, "Consciousness may very well be the lawful product of unconscious information processing. But I don’t know what that sentence means-and I don’t think anyone else does either." To me this implies that to say consciousness emerges from unconscious processes in the brain is simplistic, and creates more questions than answers. I tend to agree with Sam, and some of the people he's interviewed on this subject, but it might just be because we were both fans of psychedelics in our youth, and the effects never wore off. 😳
@@sarahtonin4649 It's been twenty years or so for me as well, but I haven't forgotten either. Those experiences are pretty solid evidence against mind, if you think about it. What I mean is that we were altering our conscious experience of reality _with_ matter. If these mental states of ours are so fragile that we can affect them with a simple compound, then it would seem that they're pretty well-grounded to our physical aspect. Real magic wouldn't be so vulnerable to worldly stuff, would it? Down to business, though: _Is consciousness merely the ability to perceive and react or respond?_ At least in part, it must be, right? Since there is so often a perceived continuity to the conscious experience that is illusory-for example, time-could it be that the phenomenon carries with it an inherent 'stickiness' quality/property that allows it to build in a cumulative fashion? Perhaps it is only with those smaller, mindless constituent units through which consciousness can arise at all. Mrs. Harris wrote a beautifully thoughtful little black book on the subject, and I must admit to being rather well-aligned with it. She may've once been a psychonaut, too. In my own experience, there is a thing as _more_ or _less_ conscious. The fact implies that there's potentially even more of it than I've experienced. There can't very well be less for me, except that is my own absence. But the point is that it's probably a gradient.
The denouement of 'The Prestige' brings home Sam's point about destroying the original of the copy being murder. Of course the originals/copies in 'The Transported Man' are the horrific price paid in order to conceal the 'trick'. However, on Sam's account of the man travelling to Mars, the dead are the necessary price that needs to be paid in order for psychological continuity to matter and sustain one identity.
The need for a personhood (Pageau's "need a cult leader" comment), is true, but will also be a dead end. A personhood is the only thing big enough to embody the truth, and simultaneously too small to embody the truth. Is this where "anointing" comes in? And why churches oriented around a pastor (a temporarily embodied God image) are okay for a time, but should also, usually, die with the pastor.
I think the problem of the repugnant conclusion is based on an ilogical or at least unfounded premise, which is that more lives are necesarily better than less lives (and in the example of the teenage pregancy, than non existance). If that where the case, a thousand misserable people must be better than only ten persons just as misserable, simply because ther are more lives. In my view the higher average of wellbeing is more important and better that the same "amount of wellbeing" spread thiner over more lives
They addressed this in the whole conversation behind the paywall. The problem with the average view is that then, the best possible world is one single, extremely happy individual. The average would then be as high as it could be, but will we really say that a "world" of one is better than a slightly unhappier world of billions? Conversely, if everyone in the world is in a state of absolute, 100 % suffering, if you then bring into the world someone who is suffering "only" 99% of the time, then you will have improved the average happiness, and thereby done something good - yet it seems obscene to say that bringing someone who suffers 99 % of the time into the world is a good thing just because it increases the average happiness.
@@alaron5698 my intuitions are that there are some questionable assumptions embedded in the repugnant conclusion. havent thought about it that much but one thought im now able to put into words which isnt so much an objection to the so called repugnant conclusion itself but more to the framing of it as repgugnant is that there seems to maybe be a suspicious assumption about how much or how little good there is in lives that are barely worth living. i suspect we may be underestimating or not appreciating how good lives are that are worth living even if they are only barely worth living. i think what might be happening is we're imagining lives that actually arent worth living and then conflate those with lives that are barely worth living and then we make the mistake of thinking of the conclusion as repugnant. i think that might be one thing that's going on with this repugnant conclusion. but idk if this sort of response has been replied to by someone.
If instead of total happiness, you look at total suffering, the repugnant conclusion falls apart. The buddhist conclusion that "life is suffering" attests to this. People are just very bad at noticing and remembering past suffering and are blinded by the illusion of lasting happiness on the horizon. I'm surprised Sam doesn't bring any of this up to challenge the views.
I think this is likely because he’s already addressed it elsewhere, if I’m not mistaken in response to antinatalism which is the argument you’re touching on: Sam has spoken about the problem of the experiencing and the remembering self - most people when asked to judge their own happiness, speak necessarily as the remembering self, which drastically undervalues and underestimates a given experience whereas if you asked that person at intervals throughout the experience to rate their happiness they give a much more accurate and much happier description of it. The quote that “life is suffering” as a summation/foundation of Buddhist thinking is inaccurate and misleading - an unfortunate translation error. More accurate would be to say “life is unfulfilling” - not in a negative sense, but it’s an observation that also calls us to enjoy and live in the happiness of the moment because it cannot last forever. Every goal we seek to attain, once met, has ended, and so cannot be that which brings total fulfillment thereafter - it’s on to the next. Sam describes an athlete who spends their entire life to win the Olympics, -they stand on the podium, happy, and yet they do not wish that moment to last forever, to stand with applause that never ends, forever on that podium in that one moment of happiness - even if it’s the culmination of their entire life’s work and love, it cannot fulfill beyond that moment, and so they begin searching for the next moment that will bring happiness and so on and so on. Both of these ideas Sam has expressed thoughtfully and at length and lead us to this “assumption” that living is better than not having lived, though granted assuming not all people are living the worst possible lives imaginable. Sam’s project of his waking up app in large part aims to help people break free of the remembering self and live in the moment essentially through meditation, increasing the awareness and potential for others to learn how to live more fulfilling, happy lives despite circumstances.
Awesome Sam! Just curious, never got answer across the years asking. Still trying 🎉 1. Would you consider interviewing Peter Joseph on the Resource Based Economic System and 2. Destiny, the Twitch streamer / “Ben Shapiro of the Left”?
A life that is "better than nothing". That's a very sneaky false premise that any existence at all is better than non-existence or more specifically never beginning to exist.
Agreed 100% and thank you. Asking if I wasn’t here so that someone else’s life could be better is also a contradiction, because there would be no ‘I’ in that case to have an opinion. What is your opinion of the infinite number of people who are not here now? You can’t have one.
@@andybaldman Obviously it could be the case that someone else's life would be better if you weren't here, or that someone else who would have existed instead had you not existed would have a better life than you now have. That involves no contradiction.
@@TotalitarianDemocrat You're missing the contradiction. In that case there would be no 'I' to even have an opinion about it. I'd rather have a world full of fewer people, (with or without me in it), who are all happy, than any greater number of people (that may or may not have me) who are less happy.
@@andybaldman The relevant comparison here is not between the quality of life of a non-existent 'you' and that of another hypothetical person in the scenario in which this person exists and you don't. The relevant comparison is between the actually existent 'you' in the scenario in which you exist, on the one hand, and this other hypothetical person in the scenario in which they exist, on the other hand. You can have an opinion about the quality of your life in the first, actual scenario (because you actually exist in this scenario), and this other person can have an opinion about the quality of their life in the second, hypothetical scenario (because they exist in this scenario). And their life in the hypothetical scenario could be better than your life is in the actual scenario. That is the comparison. It does not matter that you do not exist in the hypothetical scenario in order to have an opinion (or that they do not exist in the actual scenario).
He just left social media and runs his patreon for his subscribers. Plenty of people still love him. He just cut down on most of the people who hated him, which is why you hear about him less in the media. Smart move on his part.
Other than corpses of dead children in your basement, Excellent podcast. Caused me great pause and afforded me new ways of existing in the world. It's time we looked at a future for everyone, even those who we will often disagree with. The end of violence is something I often ponder. Under what conditions, if any, could this exist? Any discussion that reduces the need for violence could be seen as good. Our future, however, has yet to be writ. That's what I do know.
It's silly to talk about "good lives" on a population scale. "Good" isn't a real word. It's a placeholder for each individual's different idea of something positive. You will NEVER have a population where everyone is leading a "good" life. It's an inherent contradiction. No life is independent of the others. This is why philosophy is nonsense. It's untethered not only from reality and testing, but also from logic itself. You can't start a "what if" about humans by first eliminating everything human about them. That's not "what if". That's poop on the carpet.
To evaluate an argument, you need to identify the conclusion and the premises, put the argument in standard form, decide if the argument is deductive or non-deductive, determine whether the argument succeeds logically, and assess whether the premises are true³. In this case, the conclusion of the argument is: - It's silly to talk about "good lives" on a population scale. The premises of the argument are: - "Good" isn't a real word. It's a placeholder for each individual's different idea of something positive. - You will NEVER have a population where everyone is leading a "good" life. It's an inherent contradiction. - No life is independent of the others. - Philosophy is nonsense. It's untethered not only from reality and testing, but also from logic itself. - You can't start a "what if" about humans by first eliminating everything human about them. That's not "what if". The argument in standard form is: - P1: "Good" isn't a real word. It's a placeholder for each individual's different idea of something positive. - P2: You will NEVER have a population where everyone is leading a "good" life. It's an inherent contradiction. - P3: No life is independent of the others. - P4: Philosophy is nonsense. It's untethered not only from reality and testing, but also from logic itself. - P5: You can't start a "what if" about humans by first eliminating everything human about them. That's not "what if". - C: Therefore, it's silly to talk about "good lives" on a population scale. The argument is non-deductive, because it does not claim that the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. Rather, it claims that the conclusion is probable or plausible based on the premises. The argument does not succeed logically, because it commits several fallacies, such as: - **Begging the question**: The premise that philosophy is nonsense assumes what it tries to prove, namely that philosophical questions are meaningless or illogical. - **Straw man**: The premise that you can't start a "what if" about humans by first eliminating everything human about them misrepresents the philosophical method of thought experiments, which are hypothetical scenarios used to test intuitions or principles, not to eliminate human characteristics. - **Hasty generalization**: The premise that you will never have a population where everyone is leading a "good" life jumps to a sweeping conclusion based on insufficient evidence or examples. - **Equivocation**: The premise that "good" isn't a real word uses the term "good" ambiguously, without clarifying whether it means morally good, prudentially good, aesthetically good, etc. The argument also has weak premises, because they are either false or unsupported by evidence or reasons. For example: - The premise that "good" isn't a real word is false, because "good" is a word that has meaning and usage in natural languages. Even if different people have different ideas of what is good, that does not make the word unreal or meaningless. - The premise that no life is independent of the others is vague and unclear. In what sense are lives dependent or independent? How does this relate to the notion of a good life? - The premise that philosophy is nonsense is unsupported by any evidence or reasons. It is merely an expression of opinion or prejudice. Therefore, the argument is not a good one and should be rejected. Source: Conversation with Bing, 6/6/2023 (1) How to evaluate an argument - FutureLearn. www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/logical-and-critical-thinking/0/steps/9155. (2) Identifying and Evaluating Arguments | The Writing Studio | Vanderbilt .... www.vanderbilt.edu/writing/resources/handouts/evaluating-arguments/. (3) Evaluate the arguments of others - Learn HQ - Monash University. www.monash.edu/learnhq/enhance-your-thinking/critical-thinking/evaluate-arguments-of-others. (4) Critical Thinking Worksite: Argument Evaluation - University of Idaho. www.webpages.uidaho.edu/crit_think/ctw-m/eval.htm. (5) How Do You Evaluate an Argument? Essay Example | Essays.io. essays.io/how-do-you-evaluate-an-argument-essay-example/.
@@hamcheeselettucemayosandwich Yes best that we just forget the biggest crime in human history Remember, people were hanged at Nuremberg for crimes stretching back a decade, so people like Gates, Fauci, Schwab, and those in the media such as Harris who covered for them, better not sleep too easily.
Mr. Edmond gave a poor accounting of himself in Sam's podcast. He is full of himself. I can see why some of the references are dated. Sam delayed releasing this content because it is poor.
@@JH-ji6cj This is all your fault!!! You decided to fake it all this time and convince him he was something he was not! You built up his ego of false believes! Now we have to listen to his deluded megalomaniac nonsense because you're so good at acting and lying!!!
@@christheghostwriter didn't realize supporting violent, unlawful behavior automatically made me a Trump supporter. Yall really still can't wrap your heads around how that guy got elected can you?
@@JH-ji6cj and I can absolutely wrap my head around Trump's 2016 victory: tens of millions of Americans are soft-brained, easily manipulated idiots who loved the TV guy because he appealed to their prejudices and took advantage of their ignorance and credulity. It ain't rocket science.
I partially agree in that a large portion of people don’t seem to function very well if they aren’t in possession of grandiose delusions. There seems to be a self-deception sweet spot.
Great podcast! Great book by David Edmonds too! Parfit's second book helped me sort out puzzles I couldn't get my head around many years ago when I was halfway through my masters thesis defending a form of moral realism and became persuaded by the other side. Inconvenient! I found Parfit's arguments for moral realism in On What Matters convincing, and wish his deep conceptual analysis and clever reasoning had been available to me way back then. He was a philosophical genius - a major influence in the retreat of moral anti-realism in contemporary philosophy.
THANK YOU FOR THE FREE SUBSCRIPTION SAM.
I'm a janitor, thus always looking to save money, and they gifted me many a free sub.
Ty Sam and Guest
Thanks so much
They essentially describe the copies of Hugh Jackman that David Bowie's machine creates in The Prestige
Yeah, I was just thinking that the Nolan brothers must have read Parfit!
Saved me a whole podcast. Thank you, brother
Very interesting topic indeed.
Here's a poem I wrote in 2021.
She looks at the screen
(Based on the thought experiment by philosopher Derek Parfit)
She steps in the pod
And looks at the screen
The scanner turns on
And wakes the machine
Her destination
Now flashes in green
The scanner has read
The scanner has seen
A button is pressed
The doorway shuts clean
The choice has been made
There's nothing to glean
Save for the message
"Begin the routine-
Replicate atoms-
Accept every gene-"
The penny then drops
On this horror scene
She cries in distress
Outside is serene
Then it's all over
The cruelty, the mean
Her copy sees Mars
While she's never been.
This was a fascinating conversation.
Does anyone think that morality talks can ever move the needle of the population that simply doesn't care how they treat others, a/o doesn't care to understand ? Dendrites in "the human mind can justify anything" brains are more fixed than we'd like to admit. Even the idea that "creating enemies is not a good survival strategy" doesn't transform those that can't or don't value how they treat others.
Science fiction has a neat trick that throws up these philosophical questions, recently watched “Counterpart” which was fascinating in that it touches on this psychological continuity.
Oh yeah!
First time I've seen another person mention that show out in the wild. Brilliant show.
@@PlayNiceFolks did you look for the cassette tape? I still think there may be some esoteric clue on that. I was disappointed Peter Quayle’s character wasn’t fully explored. J. K. Simmons was mesmerising. Then there was the depiction of an epidemic, predating covid… A whole lot more too. I guess it didn’t attract the audience it deserved. I ponder sometimes if science fiction writers are failed philosophers, or is it the other way around?
We are all Derek Parfit
Fascinating.
Boy, was that conclusion repugnant! Good one, reminds me of 'The Deplorable Word', a chapter title in the Narnia series. Fascinating topics actually, I must find a copy of Reasons and Persons...
what are we, some kind of a repugnant conclussion squad?
Shiny Happy people... REM had this tied down years ago. No need to overthink
I wonder a bit how to reconcile personal identity with the meditative wisdom that the idea of one single ‘looker’ is an illusion.
Imagine we have perfected the teleportation of inanimate objects; that we can disassemble and reassemble an object's atoms and molecules perfectly, so that the only difference is the object's location. So then we teleport a human, say a 35 year old volunteer prison inmate. We put him in "telepod" A and reassemble him in telepod B. What if the teleported volunteer in telepod B shows up with the mental and physical abilities of a newborn, essentially a 35 year old infant?
Do we really know enough about consciousness, memory, and personality to assume that making a perfect copy of a person's brain will make a perfect copy of everything that makes the person who they are?
We probably do. In your example, a "perfect copy" would be an atom-for-atom identical arrangement to its, um, progenitor. So far as we understand the universe at the present moment, we have no reason to believe that there is anything more magical than the properties that emerge as a result of atomic arrangement. Complex as though it may be what patterns have eventually emerged, there is nevertheless simply no evidence (yet) of any 'mind' beyond matter.
That said, if it turned out that those who step out of telepod B end up having, well, 'problems,' I wouldn't be surprised. Whether we know _everything_ about matter is one question, but whether there really is mind magic beyond matter is another. I feel comfortable in my doubt for both.
@@pocket83squared Theoretically, then, if we can duplicate, or even improve on the human brain with AI, then we should see true, self-aware, self-motivated consciousness. I don't think that'll happen, but it remains to be seen. I'm not imagining magic, or supernatural, just thinking that consciousness is not well understood. The rapid progress in AI will tell us a lot.
@@sarahtonin4649 Will it? The rapid progress in AI sure will tell the AI a lot; you and I are stuck being biological (pardon the assumption).
If I'm being honest with you, I'm not so sure that the biological version _is_ bona fide consciousness. I know, I know, it's self-evident and self-affirming and all that, and to have made the assertion at all is to've already established the fact for oneself, right? That's what I used to think, but I've been stuck on this topic for an inordinate amount of time now, and I'm really starting to think of my mental experience as being a sort of mimicry of what a _real_ omni-directional consciousness would entail. Seems there are sort of levels to it-degrees of resolution-and I'm not entirely convinced that mine is so finely crafted.
Something that's capital-C Conscious would be aware of both states of experience simultaneously: that of telepod A, _and_ that of telepod B, and further, it would also encompass an awareness of every conceivable continuity extant between the two, as well as be in possession of an understanding of every disjoint. In comparison, we 'conscious creatures' really do function like 2-d 'copies' of a 3-d thing.
And why is it a surprise? Our minds were crafted by evolution to be environment-prediction machines; we are only experiencing in-head simulations of what's real. Is our calling it consciousness not hubris?
@@pocket83squared I suppose it depends on how we define consciousness. Is consciousness merely the ability to perceive and react or respond? A machine can do that, but is it aware of doing that? Is consciousness the same as awareness? Sam has quoted Thomas Nagle -- that a creature is conscious if there is "something that it's like" to be that creature. At the end of his essay The Mystery of Consciousness he says, "Consciousness may very well be the lawful product of unconscious information processing. But I don’t know what that sentence means-and I don’t think anyone else does either." To me this implies that to say consciousness emerges from unconscious processes in the brain is simplistic, and creates more questions than answers. I tend to agree with Sam, and some of the people he's interviewed on this subject, but it might just be because we were both fans of psychedelics in our youth, and the effects never wore off. 😳
@@sarahtonin4649 It's been twenty years or so for me as well, but I haven't forgotten either. Those experiences are pretty solid evidence against mind, if you think about it. What I mean is that we were altering our conscious experience of reality _with_ matter. If these mental states of ours are so fragile that we can affect them with a simple compound, then it would seem that they're pretty well-grounded to our physical aspect. Real magic wouldn't be so vulnerable to worldly stuff, would it?
Down to business, though: _Is consciousness merely the ability to perceive and react or respond?_ At least in part, it must be, right? Since there is so often a perceived continuity to the conscious experience that is illusory-for example, time-could it be that the phenomenon carries with it an inherent 'stickiness' quality/property that allows it to build in a cumulative fashion? Perhaps it is only with those smaller, mindless constituent units through which consciousness can arise at all. Mrs. Harris wrote a beautifully thoughtful little black book on the subject, and I must admit to being rather well-aligned with it. She may've once been a psychonaut, too.
In my own experience, there is a thing as _more_ or _less_ conscious. The fact implies that there's potentially even more of it than I've experienced. There can't very well be less for me, except that is my own absence. But the point is that it's probably a gradient.
The denouement of 'The Prestige' brings home Sam's point about destroying the original of the copy being murder. Of course the originals/copies in 'The Transported Man' are the horrific price paid in order to conceal the 'trick'. However, on Sam's account of the man travelling to Mars, the dead are the necessary price that needs to be paid in order for psychological continuity to matter and sustain one identity.
The need for a personhood (Pageau's "need a cult leader" comment), is true, but will also be a dead end. A personhood is the only thing big enough to embody the truth, and simultaneously too small to embody the truth.
Is this where "anointing" comes in? And why churches oriented around a pastor (a temporarily embodied God image) are okay for a time, but should also, usually, die with the pastor.
I think the problem of the repugnant conclusion is based on an ilogical or at least unfounded premise, which is that more lives are necesarily better than less lives (and in the example of the teenage pregancy, than non existance). If that where the case, a thousand misserable people must be better than only ten persons just as misserable, simply because ther are more lives.
In my view the higher average of wellbeing is more important and better that the same "amount of wellbeing" spread thiner over more lives
They addressed this in the whole conversation behind the paywall. The problem with the average view is that then, the best possible world is one single, extremely happy individual. The average would then be as high as it could be, but will we really say that a "world" of one is better than a slightly unhappier world of billions? Conversely, if everyone in the world is in a state of absolute, 100 % suffering, if you then bring into the world someone who is suffering "only" 99% of the time, then you will have improved the average happiness, and thereby done something good - yet it seems obscene to say that bringing someone who suffers 99 % of the time into the world is a good thing just because it increases the average happiness.
@@alaron5698 my intuitions are that there are some questionable assumptions embedded in the repugnant conclusion. havent thought about it that much but one thought im now able to put into words which isnt so much an objection to the so called repugnant conclusion itself but more to the framing of it as repgugnant is that there seems to maybe be a suspicious assumption about how much or how little good there is in lives that are barely worth living. i suspect we may be underestimating or not appreciating how good lives are that are worth living even if they are only barely worth living. i think what might be happening is we're imagining lives that actually arent worth living and then conflate those with lives that are barely worth living and then we make the mistake of thinking of the conclusion as repugnant. i think that might be one thing that's going on with this repugnant conclusion. but idk if this sort of response has been replied to by someone.
If instead of total happiness, you look at total suffering, the repugnant conclusion falls apart. The buddhist conclusion that "life is suffering" attests to this. People are just very bad at noticing and remembering past suffering and are blinded by the illusion of lasting happiness on the horizon. I'm surprised Sam doesn't bring any of this up to challenge the views.
I think this is likely because he’s already addressed it elsewhere, if I’m not mistaken in response to antinatalism which is the argument you’re touching on: Sam has spoken about the problem of the experiencing and the remembering self - most people when asked to judge their own happiness, speak necessarily as the remembering self, which drastically undervalues and underestimates a given experience whereas if you asked that person at intervals throughout the experience to rate their happiness they give a much more accurate and much happier description of it. The quote that “life is suffering” as a summation/foundation of Buddhist thinking is inaccurate and misleading - an unfortunate translation error. More accurate would be to say “life is unfulfilling” - not in a negative sense, but it’s an observation that also calls us to enjoy and live in the happiness of the moment because it cannot last forever. Every goal we seek to attain, once met, has ended, and so cannot be that which brings total fulfillment thereafter - it’s on to the next. Sam describes an athlete who spends their entire life to win the Olympics, -they stand on the podium, happy, and yet they do not wish that moment to last forever, to stand with applause that never ends, forever on that podium in that one moment of happiness - even if it’s the culmination of their entire life’s work and love, it cannot fulfill beyond that moment, and so they begin searching for the next moment that will bring happiness and so on and so on. Both of these ideas Sam has expressed thoughtfully and at length and lead us to this “assumption” that living is better than not having lived, though granted assuming not all people are living the worst possible lives imaginable. Sam’s project of his waking up app in large part aims to help people break free of the remembering self and live in the moment essentially through meditation, increasing the awareness and potential for others to learn how to live more fulfilling, happy lives despite circumstances.
Yeah. All of this is pretty weak sauce. So many things in this discussion are so easily refutable. Sam’s blind spots don’t let him see them.
Awesome Sam!
Just curious, never got answer across the years asking. Still trying 🎉
1. Would you consider interviewing Peter Joseph on the Resource Based Economic System and 2. Destiny, the Twitch streamer / “Ben Shapiro of the Left”?
Destiny is a little kid playing at philosophy and politics. Yuck.
I had to wipe my face with a towel several times due to the imagined spit spatter on my face as the guest was talking.
Excelente Sam Harris!!
A life that is "better than nothing". That's a very sneaky false premise that any existence at all is better than non-existence or more specifically never beginning to exist.
In this context it's a hypothetical
Agreed 100% and thank you. Asking if I wasn’t here so that someone else’s life could be better is also a contradiction, because there would be no ‘I’ in that case to have an opinion. What is your opinion of the infinite number of people who are not here now? You can’t have one.
@@andybaldman Obviously it could be the case that someone else's life would be better if you weren't here, or that someone else who would have existed instead had you not existed would have a better life than you now have. That involves no contradiction.
@@TotalitarianDemocrat You're missing the contradiction. In that case there would be no 'I' to even have an opinion about it.
I'd rather have a world full of fewer people, (with or without me in it), who are all happy, than any greater number of people (that may or may not have me) who are less happy.
@@andybaldman The relevant comparison here is not between the quality of life of a non-existent 'you' and that of another hypothetical person in the scenario in which this person exists and you don't. The relevant comparison is between the actually existent 'you' in the scenario in which you exist, on the one hand, and this other hypothetical person in the scenario in which they exist, on the other hand. You can have an opinion about the quality of your life in the first, actual scenario (because you actually exist in this scenario), and this other person can have an opinion about the quality of their life in the second, hypothetical scenario (because they exist in this scenario). And their life in the hypothetical scenario could be better than your life is in the actual scenario. That is the comparison. It does not matter that you do not exist in the hypothetical scenario in order to have an opinion (or that they do not exist in the actual scenario).
... Actually, you put the lime in the coconut and drink it all up...
Gosh! PPE at Oxford with a lithp!
Well connected eh?
Sam Harris looks like Toby from The Office.
Ben Stiller
Sten Biller
Sam "Covid Hitler" Harris
You clearly have zero life experience if you think this guy is Hitler. Go outside.
So like, why did people suddenly stop caring about Sam Harris? What happened? He was huge at one point.
He just left social media and runs his patreon for his subscribers. Plenty of people still love him. He just cut down on most of the people who hated him, which is why you hear about him less in the media. Smart move on his part.
@@andybaldman true, I was just curious since he was such a prominent figure back in the 2016 era.
Other than corpses of dead children in your basement, Excellent podcast. Caused me great pause and afforded me new ways of existing in the world. It's time we looked at a future for everyone, even those who we will often disagree with. The end of violence is something I often ponder. Under what conditions, if any, could this exist? Any discussion that reduces the need for violence could be seen as good. Our future, however, has yet to be writ. That's what I do know.
I LIKE PARFAIT !!! mmm
As do I, Parfaits are delicious.
It's silly to talk about "good lives" on a population scale. "Good" isn't a real word. It's a placeholder for each individual's different idea of something positive. You will NEVER have a population where everyone is leading a "good" life. It's an inherent contradiction. No life is independent of the others. This is why philosophy is nonsense. It's untethered not only from reality and testing, but also from logic itself. You can't start a "what if" about humans by first eliminating everything human about them. That's not "what if". That's poop on the carpet.
To evaluate an argument, you need to identify the conclusion and the premises, put the argument in standard form, decide if the argument is deductive or non-deductive, determine whether the argument succeeds logically, and assess whether the premises are true³.
In this case, the conclusion of the argument is:
- It's silly to talk about "good lives" on a population scale.
The premises of the argument are:
- "Good" isn't a real word. It's a placeholder for each individual's different idea of something positive.
- You will NEVER have a population where everyone is leading a "good" life. It's an inherent contradiction.
- No life is independent of the others.
- Philosophy is nonsense. It's untethered not only from reality and testing, but also from logic itself.
- You can't start a "what if" about humans by first eliminating everything human about them. That's not "what if".
The argument in standard form is:
- P1: "Good" isn't a real word. It's a placeholder for each individual's different idea of something positive.
- P2: You will NEVER have a population where everyone is leading a "good" life. It's an inherent contradiction.
- P3: No life is independent of the others.
- P4: Philosophy is nonsense. It's untethered not only from reality and testing, but also from logic itself.
- P5: You can't start a "what if" about humans by first eliminating everything human about them. That's not "what if".
- C: Therefore, it's silly to talk about "good lives" on a population scale.
The argument is non-deductive, because it does not claim that the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. Rather, it claims that the conclusion is probable or plausible based on the premises.
The argument does not succeed logically, because it commits several fallacies, such as:
- **Begging the question**: The premise that philosophy is nonsense assumes what it tries to prove, namely that philosophical questions are meaningless or illogical.
- **Straw man**: The premise that you can't start a "what if" about humans by first eliminating everything human about them misrepresents the philosophical method of thought experiments, which are hypothetical scenarios used to test intuitions or principles, not to eliminate human characteristics.
- **Hasty generalization**: The premise that you will never have a population where everyone is leading a "good" life jumps to a sweeping conclusion based on insufficient evidence or examples.
- **Equivocation**: The premise that "good" isn't a real word uses the term "good" ambiguously, without clarifying whether it means morally good, prudentially good, aesthetically good, etc.
The argument also has weak premises, because they are either false or unsupported by evidence or reasons. For example:
- The premise that "good" isn't a real word is false, because "good" is a word that has meaning and usage in natural languages. Even if different people have different ideas of what is good, that does not make the word unreal or meaningless.
- The premise that no life is independent of the others is vague and unclear. In what sense are lives dependent or independent? How does this relate to the notion of a good life?
- The premise that philosophy is nonsense is unsupported by any evidence or reasons. It is merely an expression of opinion or prejudice.
Therefore, the argument is not a good one and should be rejected.
Source: Conversation with Bing, 6/6/2023
(1) How to evaluate an argument - FutureLearn. www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/logical-and-critical-thinking/0/steps/9155.
(2) Identifying and Evaluating Arguments | The Writing Studio | Vanderbilt .... www.vanderbilt.edu/writing/resources/handouts/evaluating-arguments/.
(3) Evaluate the arguments of others - Learn HQ - Monash University. www.monash.edu/learnhq/enhance-your-thinking/critical-thinking/evaluate-arguments-of-others.
(4) Critical Thinking Worksite: Argument Evaluation - University of Idaho. www.webpages.uidaho.edu/crit_think/ctw-m/eval.htm.
(5) How Do You Evaluate an Argument? Essay Example | Essays.io. essays.io/how-do-you-evaluate-an-argument-essay-example/.
@@jjjccc728 Wow you were quite charitable to that random person's belch
@Jjjccc7 this labor of your comment (vs "Emo labor"), is what I can support.
@@jjjccc728 You just demonstrated by this attentive rebuttal why philosophy isn't useless. He was himself attempting to philosophy, badly
Still sterilising your groceries Sam?
Still banging on about covid like it’s 2020? Cringe, move on.
@@hamcheeselettucemayosandwich Yes best that we just forget the biggest crime in human history Remember, people were hanged at Nuremberg for crimes stretching back a decade, so people like Gates, Fauci, Schwab, and those in the media such as Harris who covered for them, better not sleep too easily.
Mr. Edmond gave a poor accounting of himself in Sam's podcast. He is full of himself. I can see why some of the references are dated. Sam delayed releasing this content because it is poor.
As Sam's wife always says "He just cant finish the job!" - Post the full interview Poindexter, no one is signing up for you're Orange man bad website!
"I HATE YOU, please tell me more"
Wonderful tactic genius
@@JH-ji6cj This is all your fault!!! You decided to fake it all this time and convince him he was something he was not! You built up his ego of false believes! Now we have to listen to his deluded megalomaniac nonsense because you're so good at acting and lying!!!
I miss the old Sam Harris. Before he bent over backwards to appease people who loot businesses.
Trumphumper says what?
@@christheghostwriter didn't realize supporting violent, unlawful behavior automatically made me a Trump supporter. Yall really still can't wrap your heads around how that guy got elected can you?
@@JH-ji6cj and I can absolutely wrap my head around Trump's 2016 victory: tens of millions of Americans are soft-brained, easily manipulated idiots who loved the TV guy because he appealed to their prejudices and took advantage of their ignorance and credulity. It ain't rocket science.
@@christheghostwriter That explanation actually explains why many people voted for him or failed to vote for Clinton
" . . . appease people who loot businesses." ?
Sammy The Pseudo Harris
Rides Again
Whatever
Morality does not exist without God. Our current civilization is proof.
And everyone did what was right in their own eyes
Which god?
@@mardishores4016 there's only one silly
@@mardishores4016 the one not called Satan. Name me any successful civilization of the last 1500 years and I'll name you it's God
I partially agree in that a large portion of people don’t seem to function very well if they aren’t in possession of grandiose delusions. There seems to be a self-deception sweet spot.
Sam who?