Any disagreements I have with your answers are so trivial that describing them is probably useless. I don't know if I would even characterize them as disagreements so much as perhaps a slightly different version of what you have written.
On the meaning of life, no disagreement at all. Sometimes I think that the key question in life is which short-term desires to deny in pursuit of longer term desires. It is a question I ask myself almost every day, all day long. The longer term desires are exactly the goals that evolution programmed my brain to pursue. Now that I have retired from what might be called a successful career and have four grown sons and a number of grandchildren, I wonder how much more I want to persuade my communities that I am a useful person and how much more I want to insure the success of my descendants.
On knowledge, again, no disagreement. Who can seriously argue that they have something better than the track record of science, which has accomplished things that seem miraculous to my primate brain? Still, I think much of scientific inquiry is a mystery, and that induction and deduction are used far less frequently than philosophers of science claim. Abduction, on the other hand, seems to me to occur regularly, but nobody understands how we abduct. That is, I think that scientists often think "X, Y, Z would make sense if W were true," but how does "W could be true" pop into their heads? I also think that discoveries often involve metaphors and analogies, and it also is not clear how scientists suddenly see analogical similarities.
On is there a god, I think it is important to specify which god(s). All of the gods proposed to date that I am familiar with are indeed unsupported by evidence, full of contradictions, and useless for explaining anything. For the most part, gods proposed to date all seem to have at least some characteristics of humans, which makes them look suspiciously like projections of the human mind. On the other hand, I would not rule out the possibility of something out there with intelligence that is so far beyond what we have that the being would appear godlike to us. Rather like Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law. The universe is a big place and a lot of time has passed that might have allowed the evolution of some super intelligence that has been able to meddle in our reality from a distance. The only "evidence" I have for such a super intelligence is that I have experienced a lot of weird things in my lifetime. Of course I am willing to accept that these are just weird things and have nothing to do with a godlike super-intelligence.
On politics, no argument at all. Which is why I find politics simultaneously interesting but depressing.
The morally right or wrong question might be the one question where my views diverge somewhat significantly from yours, but maybe not. My view, which I call, tongue-in-cheek, Real Utilitarianism, attempts to broaden the question of "What is good?" to "What is something good for?" I do not believe in timeless moral truths, the idea that certain thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are intrinsically good or bad. For me, the question "Is X good?" is meaningless, but that the question "Is X good for accomplishing Y" is meaningful and can be answered. So, if someone like Sam Harris wants to ask whether X promotes or detracts from human wellbeing or flourishing, that question might be answerable, although the answer might be really complicated, like, "X promotes (this particular kind of wellbeing) for these kinds of people under these conditions." Moral particularlism might be claiming something similar; I'm not sure. I have a paper in progress that explains why I think that both deontology and virtue ethics are actually special cases of consequentialism) and why Real Utilitarianism is the most sensible form of consequentialism.
On free will, I have mostly agreed critics of the concept, especially Robert Sapolsky. For the most part, it seems to me that philosophers who have argued for the existence of free will have not truly thought about what they even mean by "free will." I cannot take seriously those who think that there is a kind of free will that transcends naturalistic causality. However, I can certainly concede that there is a kind of "free will" if you define it as the ability to successfully self-regulate. Defined that way, it is not an either/or question, but, rather, a question of individual differences. Some people are better at self-regulation than others. This seems to me to be the kind of free will that Kevin Mitchell has written about, and even Sapolsky says that some people (e.g., addicts) are trapped by their desire for short-term outcomes and therefore lack the freedom to pursue healthier long-term outcomes. That is, individual differences in the ability to self-regulate are related to individual differences in achieving meaningful lives.
On consciousness, it is obviously an outcome of brain activity. But I have not yet seen a good explanation for how the brain does that, and I doubt that philosophers or psychologists will come up with a good explanation. I think it is more likely to come from electrical engineers than soft scientists or humanists.
On death, it is difficult not to be afraid of dangerous situations that might kill us because that is part of our biological inheritance. Given that eventual death is inevitable, I try to look on the bright side, that at least I can finally stop working so hard and be free from stress and suffering.
On happiness, of course we cannot achieve long-lasting happiness, particularly if we define happiness as pleasure. On the other hand, I often find myself in a state of contentment or acceptance, even when I am not happy. That is good enough for me.
Utopia? Of course not. I am curious what future civilizations will look like after I am long gone, which is for me the bitch about dying. Life is like reading a book without seeing how it turns out.
Should we bring more people into the world? This is a specific version of the question of what is morally good because it begins with the word "should." I would therefore counter with my question, "Good for whom or what?"
"Trivial disagreements" is a stretch. You laid out a full ethical theory in there, Real Utilitarianism, a specific account of free will as self-regulation, a fairly settled naturalist take on consciousness. That's several real positive commitments, stated with a fair amount of confidence.
The one bit that felt careful was the aside about a possible super-intelligence, some "weird" stuff you can't explain, held open instead of resolved either way. That's the only spot in the whole comment where you're actually withholding assent instead of asserting it. Curious why that one gets suspended and the rest doesn't.
Empirical data are useless without good theories, and good theories are not self-evident but heavily reliant on the consensus of a bunch of status-seeking bullshitters. As far as I can tell, science is more a tool for bullshitting than it is a way to reach long term fitness goals. Better predictions (relative to less sophisticated bullshitting strategies) are just a byproduct. This scientist ain’t bending the knee.
I think of 'free will' very simply: it's a mastery of constraint. My ability to speak and write is evidence of mastering the constraints of the English language - rules of grammar etc. The constraints of grammar enables us to communicate with others. We don't however feel those constraints as constraints, because our mastery enables us. What we feel as constraints is that we haven't or cannot master. I think the concept of free will is psychologically derived from out of our lack, or incapacity, to master and resentment of those who have. Slave morality as Nietzsche describes it.
This is a breath of fresh air, way more enjoyable than the academic droning that smothers most philosophy writing. Emotion utilitarianism is a new one for me and it actually makes a lot of sense, we're all already doing exactly that, just pretending we're not.
What got me most, though, is that you spend this whole piece debunking meaning, God, utopia, moral certainty, all of it, and then land on a genuinely confident, dogmatic answer at the end anyway: parenthood is the meaning. No hedge, no "maybe," just the thing that cured your own existential angst, generalized outward. Kind of undercuts the whole "everything is bullshit" framing, or maybe proves it, since apparently even committed bullshit-detectors need one thing that isn't.
I don't have kids, just a cat, so I'll withhold judgment on whether you're right. Seems like the safer move anyway.
Well, you had me until the end. Yes, reproduction is the closest we come to having a purpose because gene replication is literally our purpose, along with every current and previous organism.
"What this means is that it’s the mathematical structures discovered by science, rather than the slippery metaphors and ape grunts we use to communicate them, that are real."
*High-Five!!*
"Mathematics is ontology: it writes the system of the laws of being qua being" - Alain Badiou
--
"God no. If you judge the God hypothesis the way you’d judge any other scientific hypothesis—parsimony, precision, predictive power, explanatory power, consistency with empirical knowledge—then it’s about the worst hypothesis in history. "
Why would you judge the God hypothesis that way? The right way to judge it is abductive, from the perspective of multilevel sociobiological-cultural coevolution. And considering that Abrahamic religions conquered the world, and even today religious people have been observed to have better mental health and even lifespan, it's clear that by the appropriate choice of language game for the God question, there most certainly is a God.
For an individual, of course, this must be a Hermeneutic choice: you and I don't feel that the Christian faith compelling nor necessary for "meaning" and so we do not take Kierkegaard's leap of faith. But we must not be Dawkins' style new Atheist anti-preachers either!
--
"How should we decide what’s morally right or wrong?"
For policy? That's the field of Welfare Economics. I like Amartya Sen's capability vectors. No one in that field takes utilitarianism seriously.
For an individual? Either join a tribe whose values are given to you, or go Ubermensch and construct your own.
--
"Do we have free will?"
A meaningless "bewitchment of our intelligence by language" (Wittgenstein) as far as philosophical discussions. But a very important concept for legal theory.
---
"WTF is up with consciousness?"
Wittgenstein dismantles this silly discussion in the Philosophical Investigations.
One can say "I'm conscious!" after waking up from a coma, or after becoming aware of some profound new life meaning (usually some tribal warfare, e.g. "class consciousness"), or other mundane examples, and that's all there is to it.
---
"So should we bring more people into the world?"
In general yes, of course, but there's a reason humanity is experiencing Mouse Utopia and there is a sharp rise in the childfree/childless. One can point to specific incentive failures,
but their breakdown are simply epiphenomenal components of the turning of civilization from Phase 3 to Phase 4 of the four phase cycle civilization model. Biologically - why put in all the K-reproduction investment if you don't have confidence that your hypothetical children will successfully reproduce, and your children's children?
Any disagreements I have with your answers are so trivial that describing them is probably useless. I don't know if I would even characterize them as disagreements so much as perhaps a slightly different version of what you have written.
On the meaning of life, no disagreement at all. Sometimes I think that the key question in life is which short-term desires to deny in pursuit of longer term desires. It is a question I ask myself almost every day, all day long. The longer term desires are exactly the goals that evolution programmed my brain to pursue. Now that I have retired from what might be called a successful career and have four grown sons and a number of grandchildren, I wonder how much more I want to persuade my communities that I am a useful person and how much more I want to insure the success of my descendants.
On knowledge, again, no disagreement. Who can seriously argue that they have something better than the track record of science, which has accomplished things that seem miraculous to my primate brain? Still, I think much of scientific inquiry is a mystery, and that induction and deduction are used far less frequently than philosophers of science claim. Abduction, on the other hand, seems to me to occur regularly, but nobody understands how we abduct. That is, I think that scientists often think "X, Y, Z would make sense if W were true," but how does "W could be true" pop into their heads? I also think that discoveries often involve metaphors and analogies, and it also is not clear how scientists suddenly see analogical similarities.
On is there a god, I think it is important to specify which god(s). All of the gods proposed to date that I am familiar with are indeed unsupported by evidence, full of contradictions, and useless for explaining anything. For the most part, gods proposed to date all seem to have at least some characteristics of humans, which makes them look suspiciously like projections of the human mind. On the other hand, I would not rule out the possibility of something out there with intelligence that is so far beyond what we have that the being would appear godlike to us. Rather like Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law. The universe is a big place and a lot of time has passed that might have allowed the evolution of some super intelligence that has been able to meddle in our reality from a distance. The only "evidence" I have for such a super intelligence is that I have experienced a lot of weird things in my lifetime. Of course I am willing to accept that these are just weird things and have nothing to do with a godlike super-intelligence.
On politics, no argument at all. Which is why I find politics simultaneously interesting but depressing.
The morally right or wrong question might be the one question where my views diverge somewhat significantly from yours, but maybe not. My view, which I call, tongue-in-cheek, Real Utilitarianism, attempts to broaden the question of "What is good?" to "What is something good for?" I do not believe in timeless moral truths, the idea that certain thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are intrinsically good or bad. For me, the question "Is X good?" is meaningless, but that the question "Is X good for accomplishing Y" is meaningful and can be answered. So, if someone like Sam Harris wants to ask whether X promotes or detracts from human wellbeing or flourishing, that question might be answerable, although the answer might be really complicated, like, "X promotes (this particular kind of wellbeing) for these kinds of people under these conditions." Moral particularlism might be claiming something similar; I'm not sure. I have a paper in progress that explains why I think that both deontology and virtue ethics are actually special cases of consequentialism) and why Real Utilitarianism is the most sensible form of consequentialism.
On free will, I have mostly agreed critics of the concept, especially Robert Sapolsky. For the most part, it seems to me that philosophers who have argued for the existence of free will have not truly thought about what they even mean by "free will." I cannot take seriously those who think that there is a kind of free will that transcends naturalistic causality. However, I can certainly concede that there is a kind of "free will" if you define it as the ability to successfully self-regulate. Defined that way, it is not an either/or question, but, rather, a question of individual differences. Some people are better at self-regulation than others. This seems to me to be the kind of free will that Kevin Mitchell has written about, and even Sapolsky says that some people (e.g., addicts) are trapped by their desire for short-term outcomes and therefore lack the freedom to pursue healthier long-term outcomes. That is, individual differences in the ability to self-regulate are related to individual differences in achieving meaningful lives.
On consciousness, it is obviously an outcome of brain activity. But I have not yet seen a good explanation for how the brain does that, and I doubt that philosophers or psychologists will come up with a good explanation. I think it is more likely to come from electrical engineers than soft scientists or humanists.
On death, it is difficult not to be afraid of dangerous situations that might kill us because that is part of our biological inheritance. Given that eventual death is inevitable, I try to look on the bright side, that at least I can finally stop working so hard and be free from stress and suffering.
On happiness, of course we cannot achieve long-lasting happiness, particularly if we define happiness as pleasure. On the other hand, I often find myself in a state of contentment or acceptance, even when I am not happy. That is good enough for me.
Utopia? Of course not. I am curious what future civilizations will look like after I am long gone, which is for me the bitch about dying. Life is like reading a book without seeing how it turns out.
Should we bring more people into the world? This is a specific version of the question of what is morally good because it begins with the word "should." I would therefore counter with my question, "Good for whom or what?"
Thanks, I like this idea of Real Utilitarianism. I’ll have to think more about it. Looking forward to your paper on it.
"However, I can certainly concede that there is a kind of "free will" if you define it as the ability to successfully self-regulate."
Nietzsche: 'there are only strong and weak wills.'
"Trivial disagreements" is a stretch. You laid out a full ethical theory in there, Real Utilitarianism, a specific account of free will as self-regulation, a fairly settled naturalist take on consciousness. That's several real positive commitments, stated with a fair amount of confidence.
The one bit that felt careful was the aside about a possible super-intelligence, some "weird" stuff you can't explain, held open instead of resolved either way. That's the only spot in the whole comment where you're actually withholding assent instead of asserting it. Curious why that one gets suspended and the rest doesn't.
An excellant essay on tough but important topics.
Nice work—lots of good stuff in here.
"Life is a wet noodle" Anonymous guru on an unlisted Himalayan peak.
I'll post my own soporiphic contributions as soon as I get the lid off this coffin.
Grate stuff
Empirical data are useless without good theories, and good theories are not self-evident but heavily reliant on the consensus of a bunch of status-seeking bullshitters. As far as I can tell, science is more a tool for bullshitting than it is a way to reach long term fitness goals. Better predictions (relative to less sophisticated bullshitting strategies) are just a byproduct. This scientist ain’t bending the knee.
I think of 'free will' very simply: it's a mastery of constraint. My ability to speak and write is evidence of mastering the constraints of the English language - rules of grammar etc. The constraints of grammar enables us to communicate with others. We don't however feel those constraints as constraints, because our mastery enables us. What we feel as constraints is that we haven't or cannot master. I think the concept of free will is psychologically derived from out of our lack, or incapacity, to master and resentment of those who have. Slave morality as Nietzsche describes it.
This is a breath of fresh air, way more enjoyable than the academic droning that smothers most philosophy writing. Emotion utilitarianism is a new one for me and it actually makes a lot of sense, we're all already doing exactly that, just pretending we're not.
What got me most, though, is that you spend this whole piece debunking meaning, God, utopia, moral certainty, all of it, and then land on a genuinely confident, dogmatic answer at the end anyway: parenthood is the meaning. No hedge, no "maybe," just the thing that cured your own existential angst, generalized outward. Kind of undercuts the whole "everything is bullshit" framing, or maybe proves it, since apparently even committed bullshit-detectors need one thing that isn't.
I don't have kids, just a cat, so I'll withhold judgment on whether you're right. Seems like the safer move anyway.
Well, you had me until the end. Yes, reproduction is the closest we come to having a purpose because gene replication is literally our purpose, along with every current and previous organism.
"What this means is that it’s the mathematical structures discovered by science, rather than the slippery metaphors and ape grunts we use to communicate them, that are real."
*High-Five!!*
"Mathematics is ontology: it writes the system of the laws of being qua being" - Alain Badiou
--
"God no. If you judge the God hypothesis the way you’d judge any other scientific hypothesis—parsimony, precision, predictive power, explanatory power, consistency with empirical knowledge—then it’s about the worst hypothesis in history. "
Why would you judge the God hypothesis that way? The right way to judge it is abductive, from the perspective of multilevel sociobiological-cultural coevolution. And considering that Abrahamic religions conquered the world, and even today religious people have been observed to have better mental health and even lifespan, it's clear that by the appropriate choice of language game for the God question, there most certainly is a God.
For an individual, of course, this must be a Hermeneutic choice: you and I don't feel that the Christian faith compelling nor necessary for "meaning" and so we do not take Kierkegaard's leap of faith. But we must not be Dawkins' style new Atheist anti-preachers either!
--
"How should we decide what’s morally right or wrong?"
For policy? That's the field of Welfare Economics. I like Amartya Sen's capability vectors. No one in that field takes utilitarianism seriously.
For an individual? Either join a tribe whose values are given to you, or go Ubermensch and construct your own.
--
"Do we have free will?"
A meaningless "bewitchment of our intelligence by language" (Wittgenstein) as far as philosophical discussions. But a very important concept for legal theory.
---
"WTF is up with consciousness?"
Wittgenstein dismantles this silly discussion in the Philosophical Investigations.
One can say "I'm conscious!" after waking up from a coma, or after becoming aware of some profound new life meaning (usually some tribal warfare, e.g. "class consciousness"), or other mundane examples, and that's all there is to it.
---
"So should we bring more people into the world?"
In general yes, of course, but there's a reason humanity is experiencing Mouse Utopia and there is a sharp rise in the childfree/childless. One can point to specific incentive failures,
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/human-reproduction-as-prisoners-dilemma
but their breakdown are simply epiphenomenal components of the turning of civilization from Phase 3 to Phase 4 of the four phase cycle civilization model. Biologically - why put in all the K-reproduction investment if you don't have confidence that your hypothetical children will successfully reproduce, and your children's children?
Your thoughts on God, I agree with wholeheartedly. Nice to come another atheist that has little time for Dawkins 'New Atheism'.