Ramblings with Ruslan Sirota on Consciousness, the provability of morality, the nature of truth subjective/objective

I don't believe this.  I was on and off twitter most of the day debating philosophy with Ruslan Sirota.  I actually never checked Josh's Groban's timeline all day, even tho I was on and off twitter.  This is fairly shocking for me.

It was fast and furious at times tho.  hard to reconstruct.

This is more like a scrap book than like a blog

Twitlongers:

@ruslanpiano @elizzzibeth  Ruslan's song so wonderfully describes the universe as "The big dreamer's jar."  I would defy you to prove that you are not merely a character in God's dream or a hallucinating psychotic in an asylum. Any proof that you would offer would necessarily depend on your faith on your own perceptions. I'm sorry I did not yet get a chance to read the wikipedia article that Ruslan sent a link to, but if I go based on the TED talk, that was not at all rigorously reasoned. It was an emotional appeal to faith, faith in a certain world view.  I'm not going to say that that world view is unattractive to me, but it has a certain arrogance to it, blinders to the world views of others.

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@ruslanpiano I am not a neuroscientist, but I have been reading the results of neuroscientific research. As far as I can understand based on popularized articles, neuroscientists are concluding that the conscious mind is a delusional egomaniac. Our behavior is governed by subconscious processes. The conscious mind creates post hoc rationalizations.  

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@ruslanpiano My lack of faith in my own perceptions comes from long experience of discovering how wrong I've often been. I also am intrigued by the celebrated case of the unabomber, who hit the US news at a time when perhaps you were not here. This was a man with an IQ of 170, graduate of our finest educational institutions bachelor's degree from Harvard, PhD from the University of Michigan, assistant professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley-- yet, he choose to go off into a tiny cabin in the mountains and send hand crafted letter bombs to ideosyncratically selected people, in the hopes if effecting social change.

/par When he was brought to trial, the defense and prosecution attorneys agreed that he was a paranoid schizophrenic. He asked to be allowed to defend himself, because he feared being stigmatized by an insanity plea. The judge considered him too insane to defend himself and refused his request too dismiss his attorney. 

/par I am often bemused by this example: a man so brilliant. How, though, do we conclude that he is insane?  We reach this conclusion by consensus. There is no proof that he us insane and we are sane, only the gut feeling of most people meeting him and considering his acts. How sane is anyone?

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@ruslanpiano It is interesting that you should mention Occam's razor. I was a physics major. One of the reasons I elected not to pursue physics as a career was that very principle. It seemed to me that physics theories were becoming ever more elaborate and complex. Every time a theory was seemingly established, some fact would be uncovered that would render it incomplete. This tendency of physics to become ever more complex, to require more and more study to seemed to me to violate Occam's razor, to make the likelihood of God greater.

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@ruslanpiano Now you're taking me back to the first time I did natural childbirth, at home, with no possibility of pain killers. When things got dicey, I did ask for pain relief. Fortunately, I had put myself in that situation where none was available.

But the midwife said to me that I was impeding my labor, that I must say yes to the pain, that the pain was good, that the pain brought the child. So I sat there and said "Yes, yes, yes..." Hardest thing I ever did.

Anyway, physical pain alone is not a bad thing. Not being able to experience physical pain is actually a fairly serious disorder. There are several medical conditions that cause this. Lack of pain sensation results in severe damage to the body, because people do not realize they are getting hurt.

So pain is not objectively bad in and of itself.

(Happy I'm back on my desktop, where I can put paragraph formatting on twitlonger)

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Addendum 10/4/13

Unfortunately, this conversation, which I thought was a fun conversation, apparently was not so fun for Ruslan.  He got upset after a while with what he perceived as moral relativism from me, and no sense of right and wrong.  I was sad that he got upset.  Later, he deleted a lot of tweets to me, so I can't put them up here.  It was late at night.  He must have thought the better of it in the morning.  Anyway, I did post one more tweet the next day, to answer what he was saying, so I'm going to add it here.  

I inserted paragraph breaks, because I could not do that on twitlonger.  There is some weird incompatibility between my Android phone and twitlonger.  If I try to type in to twitlonger, the cursor jumps all over the place, making it impossible to enter coherent text.  If I paste from a prepared document, the paragraph breaks are lost and I get this weird narrow column.  I don't have this problem with twitlonger from the desktop.

Anyway, this was my response to some of his comments.

@ruslanpiano I finally went to bed last night after 4 a.m., with some of your questions still unanswered. 

It seemed to me that you were concocting absurdly oversimplified examples, in an attempt to corner me into agreeing to violence in an unknown situation. I am a religious pacifist. I will not absolutely say that I would never be violent, but I will not agree in advance to be violent. You accuse me, in an angry sounding way of being a relativist. I am not a complete relativist at all. I'm not sure where you got that idea. I am somewhat relativist, and certainly always try to understand and empathize with others' points of view. 

/par (back on my cell phone, where somehow paragraph structure disappears, when pasting to twitlonger) You also attempt to convince me that I am causing someone to suffer, by not agreeing to be cornered into your oversimplified example. No. No one is suffering due to my failing to accede to your hypothetical. The hypothetical is not real. 

/par This argument did not come for me from a point of saying that I have no moral values. The point was that my moral values come from faith, not from science. Certainly, the idea of rushing to act, with an oversimplified world view, and lack of attempt to understand the points of view of others, is highly repugnant to my moral values, because I do have moral values. 

/par I understood the TED thing to be an attempt at a science of moral values. It was so labeled. This is what I was disagreeing with, not all individual positions that the speaker adopted. I was arguing that people's beliefs come from what is emotionally attractive to them, and cannot be justified scientifically. Indeed, it seems to me that when you felt unable to prove your point of view, you got very emotional indeed, essentially proving my point. 

/par It also seems to me that your certainty that you are right leads inexorably to a controlling world view that is dangerous, and in fact likely to lead to maximal suffering, rather than minimal suffering.