/lit/ - Literature

>>17395391

Morals arise as a collective property of populations, not being intrinsic to any individual whatsoever. That does not mean it is objective (in the way I think you mean this word) as a phenomenon though - moral statements do not fulfill the necessary transitivity property that a utility function must have to be properly defined as a "preference" in an "objective"/absolute sense. If A is better than B, and B is better than C, the "better" relationship would necessarily apply to the statement "A is better than C" and the relationship would be transitive. I'm sure anyone in here can very quickly think of moral statements that are not transitive in this manner.

So if moral statements cannot be framed as utility functions *in general,* (even though you might come up with examples), they cannot be objective in the sense of being absolute/optimizable. However, they are not subjective in the sense of being a property of the individual/a matter of opinion, as you absolutely need to factor in the surrounding population and even temporal dynamics to establish the current "moral state" of any given person.

In short, >>17395406 (Yawn) this discussion has been surpassed a long time ago, and only dumbasses like Sam Harris who have read kiddie books on AI think they can surpass the "is/ought" gap or think that it is even useful to talk about "objective" morality.

>>10468007

I am a PhD candidate in physics and I like /lit/ more than I do /sci/ ; I started with the greeks and made my way during college up to Witty, but wasn't able to properly tackle as much as I'd like to inbetween 20th century and Ancient Greece, let alone newer stuff. I even read pleb stuff like Land's blog (though I did read Fanged Noumena) and Scott Alexander's. Don't care much for fiction, not even sci-fi, but I appreciated what little fiction I have read over the years.

I don't care too much about getting flak from the humanities. Lots of criticism is warranted to begin with, I work with a lot of stuck up assholes and with a lot of ironically-faux-positivists that know Karl Popper by name but are staunchly positivist at heart. And these people are loud too, lots of Kakus and Tysons and Krausses around telling people data interpolation is ontological.

>>10413247

He means you should buy his book because he has so much more skin in the game than the whiny soyboys that shun him inside academia.

>I'm totally scientific without the bureaucracy guise!

With that said, I definitely recommend reading Taleb (but pirate it though).

Are there any recent attempts (books) at debunking our excessive trust of data and over glorification of statistics as having intrinsic meaning? As a physics grad I find it pretty frustrating that no one in my field actually tries to go beyond their self fulfilling prophecies of models ("you see this graph? it clearly shows WHY x happens, because it shows HOW x moves in relation to y!"). Popper tried so hard, and got so far, but in the end it didn't even matter.

>>9565131

Using that line of thinking, does it make more sense then to claim that technology will remain even after us? It is eventually going to drive our species into not being a conventional species at all anymore, or at least becoming another species, while remaining there making that new species ever more technology driven and dependant.

>>9549662

>Centuries and centuries of mathematics
>Can't model non-linear problems for shit
>Employ the craziest ad hoc handwaving linear combination techniques possible

Is there even any hope to tackle complex systems from a fundamental standpoint? We do have pretty good phenomenologies, but they're mostly pretty black boxes that we kind of just accept that they work. Do we even want to? Sometimes it feels like people working with this don't really care about philosophy anymore, and all they want is to crunch numbers into their black boxes and, at best, conduct epistemology where the black box is the standard for truth.

>>9484767

>lol y so buttoverheated

A better question to ask first, I think, would be: can programs expressing our image/an actual image of the world (i.e a simulation) be art? They would fill in the roles of painting and the like, if the answer is yes.

Then you could go deeper and try to find out what more is there to programmers that painters lack. For one they can create an evolving simulation of reality, like actors rolling out a play. But actors develop their image of reality around a script, something set on paper, while programmers need equations and the like to make a program evolve in time. It can then be asked whether or not developing reality through equations is a deeper representation than acting out a play, since it reveals the actual structure of how things develop (at least to a certain degree of approximation), and not subject to the prejudices and particular opinions of our programmers (as opposed to actors that put their feeling into plays).

If the answer to the very first question is no, though, then not much can be said about comparing programs to other, already established, forms of art. Is math art? Pure symmetry and group theory and geometry, is it all art? Then programs have a good case.

Otherwise, I don't even know how to call something art actually; what makes a song beautiful if not for a precise symmetry (or a precise lack of symmetry, in contrast)? What makes writing beautiful if not for the way it tickles our mind, through agreement or conflict (i.e symmetry or asymmetry regarding our own views of the world)?