
The Universe Knows Right from Wrong - optimalsolver
http://nautil.us/issue/89/the-dark-side/the-universe-knows-right-from-wrong
======
bawolff
Maybe im missing it, but the argument seems to be morality is objective
because everyone thinks it is. How is that not begging the question?

Then there are a bunch of pithy lines, which the author seems to treat as
obvious in context revelations, but to me seem to utterly lack
evidence/argument.

> "No matter how the universe had turned out, two plus two would equal four
> and it would have been wrong to torture people for fun."

Umm why? That seems non obvious to me.

>"Pleasure is good and suffering is bad because Reality is essentially
directed toward the former and away from the latter"

Is it though? And that's ignoring the whole question of wtf does it even mean
for reality to be directed in some direction.

> "My proposal is that the inherently directed nature of Reality entails that
> it’s objectively good for Reality when it manifests as pleasure and
> objectively bad for Reality when it manifests as pain."

Umm ok.

>"It is broadly agreed that (all things being equal) pleasure is good and pain
is bad..."

Isn't the definition of pleasure, being good. Seems kind of circular -
everyone agrees feeling good is good and feeling bad is bad.

>"The reality of objective value is a non-negotiable data-point and we are
entitled to make whatever postulations are required to account for it."

'kay then.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yeah, doesn't make sense.

I prefer a simpler argument for why there is a subset of morality that's
universal for (vast majority of) humans: argument from shared brain
architecture.

We're essentially running the same wetware under the hood, at least on the
time scales of human civilization. So while the universe doesn't necessarily
privilege a set of values, _human brains are_. And that's all that really
matters (until we meet aliens or start building conscious AIs) - conscious
experience is a feature of brains, not laws of physics in general.

~~~
roenxi
There is an even simpler explanation: some moral principles push people
towards a game-theoretic optimum, so evolution selects for it.

Eg, a society that allows random murders will be at a staggering disadvantage.
By magic, most (all?) societies have strong moral arguments against murder.
Ditto honesty - honest societies have structural advantages.

Any cooperative species will have something that looks like morality. Even
ants practice first aid.

~~~
bobthechef
"Optimum" is a moral notion. You're begging the question.

~~~
mannykannot
I don't think so. In this view, the concepts of what constitutes ethical
behavior have arisen from individuals coming to understand what sort of
society is most likely to give the best outcome according to their own long-
term self interest. This is no more begging the question than the concept of
survival of the fittest in theories of evolution, the point being that there
is a coherent concept of fitness in that case, and self-interest in this one.
In both cases, the question being addressed is "how did we arrive at the
current state of affairs, when other outcomes are at least logically
possible?"

------
fenomas
> But the problem for .. anyone who tries to ground moral truth in the natural
> world, is that moral truths, like mathematical truths, are _necessarily_
> true, which means that it’s impossible for them to be false.

What a bizarre argument. Mathematical truths are _defined_ to be true --
entirely the opposite of what the author is trying to claim about moral
truths, so this is about as absurd a comparison as one could make.

I'm no expert but this article reads to me like hand-waving psychobabble.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
> Mathematical truths are _defined_ to be true

Perhaps a nitpick, but: _axioms_ are defined to be true. Mathematics, roughly
speaking, is the business of exploring the consequences of chosen sets of
axioms. Sometimes published mathematical theorems turn out to be wrong.

~~~
jjgreen
Do you think? I'd say that axioms were just taken; there's no commitment to
their truth (since there is no need for it, and mathematics likes economy).

~~~
amelius
It also doesn't make sense to define axioms as true. What if later it turns
out that the axioms were a mutual contradiction?

~~~
jjgreen
Truth is tricky. If I state "The sky is blue", I can look out of the window,
the sky _is_ blue, my statement corresponds to the state of the world, my
statement is true, right? But in mathematics there is no window, everything is
internal, abstract, so what does "truth" mean when there is no state of the
world with which to compare? More importantly, would the mathematics be any
different if the axioms are declared to be true? No, it wouldn't make any
difference at all. So let's leave "truth" to the physicists and philosophers.

~~~
ukj
That's the first error of the objectivists. Mistaking "blue" as a property of
the sky.

Color happens in your head.

That is why trichromacy, tetrachromacy, pentachromacy, dodecachromacy etc. is
a thing.

------
keiferski
Panpsychism is a pretty interesting idea, but this article does a poor job of
explaining it and then making its own moral argument. I'd say skip the article
and read this instead:

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/)

One line of argument for panpsychism that I don't often see mentioned is that
humans/animals assume that we're the only form of consciousness in the
universe. This strikes me as rather myopic, at least as a baseline assumption.
It seems like the starting point should be _assume that other bodies in the
universe are constituted in similar ways_ and not _animals on Earth are
exceptionally, unexplainably unique._

------
BlueTemplar
I am a believer in a form of panspsychism myself, but this article is
baffling.

> But the problem for neo-Aristotelians, or indeed anyone who tries to ground
> moral truth in the natural world, is that moral truths, like mathematical
> truths, are necessarily true, which means that it’s impossible for them to
> be false.

The author completely fails to prove why that is the case, not to mention that
this isn't even true for Mathematics either, depending on your starting
axioms...

------
Drakim
Here is my take:

All knowledge is ultimately based on assumptions, and those assumptions
ultimately hang in thin air. We rely on our senses to observe the world around
us, and we rely on our mental faculties to interpenetrate what we observe. But
we have no way of knowing if our senses, and our mental faculties, can be
trusted, if they are accurate to some objective reality.

It might very well be that what we take in from our surroundings and
environment isn't an "objective reality", but an incredibly twisted and
mangled version which is has more falsehoods, inaccuracies and errors, than
any truths. To say that the sky is blue is an incredibly "human" observation,
which relies on our eyes having divided the light spectrum into arbitrary
ranges we call colors. There is no grounding to distinct colors, other than
what our eyes and brain arbitrarily imposes to make sense of what it's taking
in. It's a clever, but arbitrary, way to look at the light spectrum.

But we do the best with what we have, there is no point in wallowing in pity,
we simply work with the tools we are given. Now, even if we cannot justify it,
it does appear to us that murder is morally wrong. We are repulsed by it, we
wish to avoid it, we want to minimize it, we label those who do it as being
flawed and broken, and we have all sorts of theories and ideas about how
murder doesn't fit in with how human life operates.

Even though I cannot point you to any objective anchoring as to why murder is
wrong, I can neither point you to any objective anchoring for anything. I
cannot prove that what I see, touch, feel, smell and hear is really there, nor
that what I am observing is in any way accurate. Even the most basic
mathematical facts are suspect, if you can't verify the mental faculties
behind it.

So why reject the moral facts I cannot verify, but accept the observable,
evidential, mathematical facts that I cannot verify? Who gets to choose which
ones gets a pass? I think murder is wrong for the same reason I think the sky
is blue: because that's what my senses, body and mind tells me.

~~~
lhorie
Consider that even murder isn't universally considered bad. Examples include
wars, self defense, proponents of the death penalty, the sentinelese, etc.
Debates can get particularly heated when one gets into things like abortion
and ethical dilemmas.

As for the dichotomy of logical verification given our meat-based fallible
physical medium, I'm reminded of Godel's incompleteness theory, i.e. that it
is possible for a set of axioms to be internally consistent (e.g. basic
algebra), yet we can construct a meta set of axioms to demonstrate that it is
impossible to mathematically prove every truth therein.

~~~
Drakim
True enough, but even so, in these examples you mentioned, war, self defense,
death penalty, people struggle a lot with being mentally harmed by taking
lives. I read somewhere that Nazi Germany moved to gassing those they
persecuted rather than simply killing them by firing squad because the firing
squads couldn't handle it day in and day out. The majority of mankind abhors
murder, and has to invent elaborate methods and rules to avoid facing the
brute reality of it, even when they say that it's good.

My point is just that to me, and my society as a whole, murder is seen as
something bad, as a simple and obvious fact, a safe assumption. If somebody
wants to tell me that assumption is wrong and should be removed, I want to see
what sort of stuff their assumptions are built out of to justify such
confidence.

~~~
matz1
Because not everyone think the same. We are not machine where everyone run the
same software. Some people like chocolate, some people hate chocolate.
Likewise some people think murder is good, some people think its bad.

~~~
Drakim
Humans are not a chaotic collection of random emotions and opinions. You'll
find that those who like to eat dirt and murder others are far outnumbered by
those who like chocolate and want to live in harmony.

~~~
matz1
Maybe outnumbered but still exists and still human.

------
donatj
Right off the bat it fails epicly in its comparison of Gandhi to Epstein as
bastions of good and evil, as apparently the author is completely unaware of
Gandhi’s sleeping with children? What a horrible choice for the side of good,
given Epstein’s horrendous misdeeds.

What a horribly written horribly reasoned article. Very frustrating to read.

> But if Reality is itself a very general form of consciousness, and my
> consciousness is a specific form of that general form of consciousness, it
> follows that Reality is present within my consciousness.

No it doesn’t follow. You are fully capable of experiencing things that are
not reality. That’s just poor reasoning.

I work hard to keep my tone online positive but this article is simply
religion presenting itself as science, and it enrages me.

~~~
titzer
I share your disdain.

Half the people talking about panpsychism are just bloviating in-between hits
on DMT and are hoping to achieve Nirvana and merge with some Jungian
collective unconscious, but are usually completely ignorant of that entire
concept.

Panpsychism doesn't mean everything and everywhere is tripping on acid having
a great time. Panpsychism is actually kind of terrifying; just think about
what it must feel like to be one of a trillion trillion trillion hydrogen
atoms suddenly recruited into a massive supernova and then drifting alone for
5 billion years and being washed through the entirety of life's evolution on
Earth, taking part in a trillion different DNA molecules and cell walls; not
having any clue about what you've been a part of or why. Being a horrible-
looking blood-sucking mosquito downed by a bug-eyed frog, munched on by a
croc, farted out a horse...or frozen into a granite hunk in the dark bowels of
the Earth for eternity. No, panpsychism doesn't mean your preference for the
Yankees over the Mets are somehow the moral code of the universe, or that damn
squirrel with a twinkle in its eye is the manifestation of the all-knowing
god, you fool (author).

~~~
pas
> just think about what it must feel like to be one of a trillion trillion
> trillion hydrogen atoms [...]

Usually the models of Panpsychism have a spectrum of consciousness and
associate complexity of the thing with consciousness. So sure, let's say atoms
have some consciousness, they have as much as is seen by a first look, that is
their behavior and intelligence shows it, and it's not much, basically zero. A
rock probably has more. It probably has rock-like consciousness, it has rock-
behavior and rock-thoughts. It probably likes being a nice rock, hosting all
those crystals, flowing through places sometimes slowly, sometimes flying off
from a volcano, sometimes dissolving in a melting pool, merging with other
rocks' rock-consciousness. Of course there are grumpy rocks too, just like
there are many kinds of humans. And so on.

------
qubex
“ _Arguemnt by analogy is very powerful and entirely fallacious._ ” —Mr
Dawson, my teacher of _Theory of Knowledge_ (epistemology and critical
thinking), circa 1997

So... there is this guy, who has an opinion... okay... and?

------
wcerfgba
> It might be nice to think that the universe has an inherent moral direction,
> but do we have any evidence that it does? And if we lack good evidence for
> these claims, surely respect for Occam’s razor ought to stop us from
> accepting them? This objection, though, is jam-packed with value-claims: It
> claims what we “ought” to believe and references “good” evidence. The very
> challenge pre-supposes the reality of value.

So in attempting to provide evidence for his claims, Goff creates a weak
framing for the necessity of evidence and then attacks the framing?

~~~
hashkb
Yes, this is where he finally lost me.

------
motohagiography
There is an argument for theism that I find very persuasive, which is that,
faith is a ridiculous conclusion but a necessary axiom. The point being it's
not something you arrive at through reason after ruling out the alternatives,
it's just a point you start at, or not.

It's not an artifact of reason, but it's the other way around, where we can
only reason about the things the theistic object of faith has caused. (or even
just deistic).

Without too much woo, I'm less circumspect about these beliefs, and think we
all believe what we respectively perceive we need to. However, something
curious I think I may have discovered is that both faith and fear cannot be
experienced simultaneously. If this were true, and fear was just an
interpretation of an emergent chemical/biological artifact of life in the
universe, it implies that something which necessarily extinguished it could
also be just as real.

On the question of what is more absurd, belief in the existence of a
superbeing we cannot conceive of yet whose will we can somehow divine, or that
our reasoning is sufficient to rule out the existence of such a being, if you
have ever tried to argue with a dog or a horse or even a baby, the limits of
the latter case seem too stark to provide much confidence in their powers.

------
tasty_freeze
I tried reading "Mere Christianity" by CS Lewis on the strong recommendation
of a friend.

Its core claim is that while many of our ideals of morality shift over time,
some are absolute and transcend place and time, and therefore they must have
been created by something outside of the universe. That claim occupies only
the first few pages, and from there he attempts to further conclude that not
only is there something, it is specifically the Christian god.

~~~
Sebb767
> some are absolute and transcend place and time

Which ones? I honestly can't think of any of the top of my head for which I
wouldn't know a civilization which didn't honor them.

------
mirekrusin
"(...) consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it
(...)". I'm not sure if it means much. It's like saying that spheres prevade
universe. Great, now what? Is cat hunting little bird good or bad? Depends who
you ask. Consciousness and forms of life in general are recursions where
emergent memory and prediction qualifies it on the wide spectrum of
sophistication. Natural selection creates unhappy "recursions" from the moment
when one eats the other and discovers it gives great energy boost. Feeling
pain/pleasure is emergent feature shaped by natural selection. But there is
nothing fundamental about it that says good predictors must have it.
Evaluating options on more global scale move you closer to more global
rights/wrongs, that's all.

------
danidiaz
Bart Streumer is mentioned in the piece. His book "Unbelievable Errors: An
Error Theory about All Normative Judgements" begins with a pretty cool
sentence:

> You cannot believe the view I will defend in this book. I therefore will not
> be able to convince you that this view is true.

~~~
keiferski
Honestly not a bad approach. I wish more people just shared their ideas
instead of trying to persuade and convert me to their position.

~~~
manofmanysmiles
How can you really understand someone’s ideas without understanding all the
premises?

Isn’t it necessary for then to try to “convince” you insofar as just stating a
conclusion without supporting arguments is no different than stating an
opinion?

Or put a different way, why would you ever desire to hear opinions without
trying to understand them or establish their truth?

~~~
keiferski
Not sure how you get this from the quote. I meant that I prefer it when the
mood of a book is _this is interesting /beautiful/insightful_ and not _this is
my conclusion, now I’m going to construct an argument to convince you it’s the
right one._

~~~
manofmanysmiles
I think my reaction stemmed from

> You cannot believe the view I will defend in this book. I therefore will not
> be able to convince you that this view is true.

This appears as a concession that the truth about the topic cannot be
determined. In which case, from a philosophical point of view, what’s the
point?

That being said, I often prefer the presentation of “Here are some interesting
things I’ve observed and thoughts I’ve had. Do what you will with them.”

------
ikeboy
>This objection, though, is jam-packed with value-claims: It claims what we
“ought” to believe and references “good” evidence. The very challenge pre-
supposes the reality of value.

There's no reason those terms need to be taken as objective. They're as
socially constructed as the rest of science and philosophy. We ought to
believe things with good evidence because that's what our scientific culture
values.

If another culture didn't value that, we'd pity them for being less effective
at their goals - it turns out that updating beliefs on evidence makes you more
effective. But there's no _objective_ more sense in which they're "bad",
they're just less effective.

------
dredmorbius
Grounding a discussion of universal morality in Greek philosophy as a basis
for condemning Jeffrey Epstein is a remarkable excercise at ignoring the
elephant in the room.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece)

(This is _not_ a defence of Epstein but a criticism of the article's argument
and coherence.)

------
aaanotherhnfolk
I have only a layman's grasp of philosophy. Why doesn't this field challenge
its definitions of consciousness more, and why is ethics treated as an axiom?
These both seem like anthropocentric positions to me, limiting the discourse.
Why can't trees have a conscious experience? And who cares about the morality
of a storm cloud?

------
bobthechef
"We cannot account for necessary truths in terms of things that could have
been different. To take Aristotle’s view: We might have evolved to have
natures directed toward cruelty. In such a counterfactual scenario, we would
have moral grounds for cruelty, which runs counter to our deepest moral
convictions. Any view which tries to ground moral truth in things that might
have been different is going to face a similar problem. There will be some
counterfactual scenario in which the putative ground of morality is absent or
points us toward evil rather than the good."

What is cruelty? He's just juxtaposing abstract "cruelty" with some
unspecified hypothetical and assumes it is meaningful. Cruelty presumes
opposition to nature, so it makes no sense to say that some act A, understood
in the abstract, is cruel.

"Different statues are made of different clay; on the container view in
contrast, everything that does, or could, exist is a manifestation of the same
Reality."

Prima facie, sounds like a vulgarization of God-as-Being, i.e., all things
exist as potentially existing in relation to actually existing things, and
actually existing things are like potential things in relation to the act of
existence that causes them to be, which is God.

"If we follow Aristotle in grounding moral truth in the goal-directed nature
of human beings, then we fail to account for the necessity of moral truths."

The aim was never necessity but nature. The natural law is called thus for a
reason. I don't know what "good" or "bad" is apart from the nature of a thing.

"My proposal is that the inherently directed nature of Reality entails that
it’s objectively good for Reality when it manifests as pleasure and
objectively bad for Reality when it manifests as pain."

He's elevating the world of plural substances to the level of a single
substance and referring to it as Reality. But this does nothing to convert the
natural moral law into the necessary moral law because you've just reduced the
universe to one thing whose nature is such that such-and-such is good for it
and such-and-such is not. To accomplish that kind of necessity, he would have
to identity nature with necessity and that would require identifying what he
called "Reality" with God. If Reality is God, then this is pantheism. But why
this need to posit necessity?

"Foundational theories of morality have been locked in a perennial tug of war
between the supernaturalism of Plato and the naturalism of his opponents."

Has he explored Thomism? Forms exist only in things and the mind, but also in
God. Thus, you have both access to moral truths by knowing the natures of
things, but even with the destruction of those things, they continue to exist
in God (even if we may not be able to know them). Also, it is bad for human
beings to harm others at least because it harms the common good and thus their
own good. It is against our own natures to do so.

------
Kees_Veel
This part of the universe, me, knows that the article is wrong. So yes. But
the same part of the universe also knows that the rest doesn't know shit. No
evidence required, you can trust me, I'm from the universe.

