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.

Ramblings about ḥijāb, honor killings, sharia law, triage, and health care during tweets with Ruslan Sirota

This blog is to memorialize some twitlongers that I sent to Ruslan Sirota.

Normally I have a different twitter ID that I use for politics, when that politics does not relate to Josh Groban or pop music, but here we have a mixed situation, where I was talking to Ruslan, who is a musician for Josh, and who is so kind as to actually dialog with fans.

This conversation began with a discussion of sharia law and the use of traditional veils in Muslim countries.  We were, as I understood it, discussing first whether women in Muslim countries really want to wear the veil or not.  Then we got into the topic of honor killings, where men kill female family members who have been raped.  Then I got into the general topic of triage, difficulties in making moral decisions about who lives and who dies.

Also, Ruslan sent me this link to a YouTube video,

http://t.co/hxKLxoHmcH

I want to emphasize here that I do not believe in forcing women to wear veils, to get married, or in honor killings.  What I was trying to offer was some food for thought that might help us understand why people behave the way they do, rather than having a knee jerk negative reaction.

Probably these twitlongers are too disorganized and will give people wrong impressions of my opinions, but maybe they will be interesting.

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Twitlonger #1

I certainly do not agree with honor killings. On the other hand, I do believe that we are like goslings. 

Goslings, when they hatch from their shells, imprint on the first thing that moves. If that thing is their mother, they are in luck. She will teach them how to take care of themselves and will protect them. If that first thing is something else, they are permanently screwed.

Similarly, I believe we imprint on the first person we have sex with. Afterwards, we lose that ability to imprint. The more people we have sex with, the less our ability to imprint becomes. This has to do with internal hormones in the body, like occitocin.

People think that by having sex with more and more people they will eventually find the "right" person. No. They will become less able to bond with anyone. 

In some real sense, a girl who has been raped will never be quite right psychologically. I do not favor murdering her for that reason, but I can see where a culture decides that she will never really be able to function in their culture.

I do think that, ultimately, the public discussion of abuse of women will lessen this abuse. We see women in these countries, increasingly, inspired by public discussion, standing up for themselves and demanding change. I am very inspired by that.

Still, there are reasons for some of this stuff that we fail to understand. And we should not assume that women dress the way they dress only because they are forced to do so.

I believe that the Muslim world is going through a Puritan period. I am half WASP and half Jewish. My mom's ancestry was WASP, so I am conscious of British history. The Puritan period was a fearsome one, back then, and certainly not one that I would want to revisit. 

Still we should note that extreme measures to cover the body and become more modest prevailed in Europe during the mini-Ice Age that occurred during the Renaissance and early modern periods. Again, climate caused dress, that was later rationalized as religion.


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Twitlonger #2

Still listening to this guy, who apparently does not understand that, in 120 degree Fahrenheit heat, a person is cooler covered head to toe and well insulated than she would be in skimpier clothing. Ignorance.

Also the skin gets damaged by exposure to the sun in the desert, resulting in premature aging, which offends women's' vanity.

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Twitlonger #3

Unfortunately, you will see that I have diarrhea of the keyboard. Once I start writing, I keep thinking of more and more stuff.

I was reminded after that last post -- which unfortunately went up twice, so I deleted the second one, which I hope was not confusing -- of something I heard about Native American cultures. 

There were some where if a woman delivered a child at some time other than between March and June, she would be abandoned by the tribe and left to die with her child. That was due to the extreme conditions under which they lived, that they felt that they could not risk having to deal with the consequences of a younger baby facing fall and winter weather.

Similarly, there were some that would abandon older people to die, as well, at an age that we might consider fairly young, again because they felt that they just did not have the resources to care for the aged, if they could no longer hunt and follow the tribe properly.

These things seem shocking to us, because we have had more resources to care for people who are sick. But then we are not hunter, gatherer, nomads, living in a harsh wilderness. 

While I don't like hearing about these historical practices of some Native American tribes, I cannot say that they were evil for doing these things. They did the best they could.

Perhaps, had there been public discussion back then, as there is now, things might have changed.

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Twitlonger #4

Oh, now you've really got me going. 

I'm on to another concern I have, regarding health care in this country. 

We are making a decision to fund insurance for everyone for unlimited funds to maintain people alive in the face of extreme health conditions.

I have a friend who was treated for leukemia a few years ago. He had health insurance. His insurance paid for his treatment to the tune of well over one million dollars.

How do we really think we can afford this for everyone, when in fact not everyone has enough food? Is this not really a denial of our own mortality? A failure to accept that it is God's will that all people should eventually die?

Sometimes we go to far, I think, in the direction of never making hard decisions in life.

I feel this is related to the examples I gave before about the Native Americans, who left some people out to die, and also the decision in some cultures that a woman whose ability to bond with her husband has been damaged cannot be sustained in the culture.

I'm not saying what is right and wrong here, for sure, just that there are hard decisions that get made.

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Twitlonger #5

Oh. One more example. In my county, we have too many deer. Occasionally, one will become tame and start taking food from the hands of people going by. If the county animal control officer learns that a deer has become tame like this, the county will send someone out to shoot that deer. This offends me, but I guess they have some scientific reason why they think it's necessary. Another example of triage.

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Twitlonger #6

Also, I do totally believe that this thing about covering up women in Islamic countries is a head game. If guys believe that they will lose control sexually at the sight of a woman's body, then that's exactly what will happen.  On the other hand, in our culture, where we're getting used to seeing less and less clothing on people, then we have to keep escalating what we look at to get the same effect. Whereas, once we looked at Marilyn Monroe standing on an air vent, with her skirt blowing up, now we have to watch Lady Gaga to get the same effect. I wonder whether men in Islamic countries have less erectile dysfunction, because they're psyched into believing that it takes so little to drive them mad.

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Tweets while watching the youtube video (remember tweets are read bottom up)

Some earlier tweets to Ruslan on this topic