It seems worth thinking about it in the context of the evolution. To kill other members of our species limits the survival of our species, so we can encode it as “bad” in our literature and learning. If you think of evil as “species limiting, in the long run” then maybe you have the closest thing to a moral absolute. Maybe over the millennia we’ve had close calls and learned valuable lessons about what kills us off and what keeps us alive, and the survivors have encoded them in their subconscious as a result. Prohibitions on incest come to mind.
The remaining moral arguments seem to be about all the new and exciting ways that we might destroy ourselves as a species.
Using some formula or fixed law to compute what's good is a dead end.
> To kill other members of our species limits the survival of our species
Unless it's helps allocate more resources to those more fit to help better survival, right?;)
> species limiting, in the long run
This allows unlimited abuse of other animals who are not our species but can feel and evidently have sentience. By your logic there's no reason to feel morally bad about it.
> Using some formula or fixed law to compute what's good is a dead end.
Who said anything about a formula? It all seems conceptual and continually evolving to me. Morality evolves just like a species, and not by any formula other than "this still seems to work to keep us in the game"
> Unless it's helps allocate more resources to those more fit to help better survival, right?;)
Go read a book about the way people behave after a shipwreck and ask if anyone was "morally wrong" there.
> By your logic there's no reason to feel morally bad about it.
And yet we mostly do feel bad about it, and we seem to be the only species who does. So perhaps we have already discovered that lack of empathy for other species is species self-limiting, and built it into our own psyches.
In this thread some people say this "constitution" is too vague and should be have specific norms. So yeahh... those people. Are you one of them?)
> It all seems conceptual and continually evolving to me. Morality evolves just like a species
True
> keep us in the game"
That's a formula right there my friend
> Go read a book about the way people behave after a shipwreck and ask if anyone was "morally wrong" there.
?
> And yet we mostly do feel bad about it, and we seem to be the only species who does. So perhaps we have already discovered that lack of empathy for other species is species self-limiting, and built it into our own psyches.
or perhaps the concept of "self-limiting" is meaningless.
There's no objective anchors. Because we don't have objective truth. Every time we think we do and then 100 years later we're like wtf were we thinking.
> No, it's an analogy, or a colloquial metaphor
Formula IS a metaphor... I wrote "formula or fixed law" ... what do you think we're talking about, actual math algebra?
> There's no objective anchors. Because we don't have objective truth. Every time we think we do and then 100 years later we're like wtf were we thinking.
I believe I'm saying the same thing, and summing it up in the word "evolutionary". I have no idea what you're talking about when you suggest that I'm perhaps "one of those people". I understand the context of the thread, just not your unnecessary insinuation.
> Formula IS a metaphor... I wrote "formula or fixed law" ... what do you think we're talking about, actual math algebra?
There is no "is" here. There "is" no formula or fixed law. Formula is metaphor only in the sense that all language is metaphor. I can use the word literally this context when I say that I literally did not say anything about a formula or fixed law, because I am literally saying there is no formula or fixed law when it comes to the context of morality. Even evolution is just a mental model.
Strudel doesn't have all of the advanced features of TidalCycles. It really just depends on what you need. Strudel is easier to get started with, and definitely more visual/immediate, but TidalCycles has the full power of Haskell, longer history, and more advanced tooling. Either way, it's really nice to see people getting more involved in programmatic music, regardless of which tool they use. :)
Yes! and Shadowrun! I remember just binging William Gibson after that, until Johnny Mnemonic, Hackers (the movie), and Strange Days, came out. What a great decade.
I still have my faded paperback copy of this book, from 1986. I pulled it down off the shelf and got a jolt of nostalgia, thinking about reading it when I was kid and just being blown away by such a weird vision of the future. The cover was neat, the shades on were actually mirrored.
In the ultra running community, it's common to do a 1 mile "test" when you're feeling awful. You start your run, and if it still feels awful after 1 mile you walk on back home and try again tomorrow. Do this until you can just keep going again.
This sentiment seems sort of sad. The medium is the message. If the medium is small, the message will be small. It may be succinct and you may think you "get it", but without evidence, examples, and context, they won't stick. It's like a good tweet: repeatable and rolls of the tongue, but easily refutable and without context. I cannot imagine compressing all of the ideas in a book like "Antifragile" or "Godel, Escher, Bach" in 10 pages. It would be so short as to be meaningless, the ideas are too big.
Same for fiction. I don't want 10 pages of world building. I want immersion. "The Sun Also Rises" would be miserable at 10 pages. Nobody is trying to communicate an idea in this case, they're communicating an aesthetic, a "vibe" or a mood. 10 pages of that and on to the next thing? Sure, if that's your medium, but the medium is the message, and the book is a unique medium for communicating big ideas, immersive worlds, and extensive moods and aesthetics. I sure hope the medium for those things isn't out of date or the world will seem a little shallow.
The remaining moral arguments seem to be about all the new and exciting ways that we might destroy ourselves as a species.
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