/lit/ - Literature

in his own words, providing evidence for his claims is boring and he doesnt want to do it.

>>12045765
And yet /lit/ still can't refute it. Sad!

>>12045749
Once when I was young I burned my hand on a flame to see if it would really feel good to put it in water afterwards

>>12045749
he didn't justify anything.
i grant secular constructions of morality, but i've yet to see a secular argument for moral obligations.
so, atheists, can you tell me why I should not live at the expense of others? or more generally, why should I not act immorally if I know it will produce material benefits for myself?

>>12045749
The entire problem with this is that he still doesn't properly get through what it means for something to "really and truly suck." Human experience is, ultimately, arbitrary and particular rather than universal. It's not a standard for morality.

>>12045749
>goes from is to ought in step 5

wow he got me thanks OP

>>12045765
What about in your own words? Care to provide evidence

>>12045788
it hurts my feefees

>>12045749
charlatan. the other poster is right. he just jumps immediately into "ought" at step 5.

"things suck" --> "we should avoid that"
he does not actually provide a link between these two things

>>12045814
This act increased his utility

>>12045814
was this a display of sheer mental strength or was he on some sort of substance that made him immune to pain?

>>12045817
>utilitarianism
smbc utility monster.jpg

>>12045817
Not the argument Harris is making in the tweets.

>>12045749
you can tell this board is full of pseuds because nobody pointed out that at 2 he asserts that conscious minds exist yet he's yet to demonstrate that assertion.

>>12045873
The whole image is basically like shooting fish in a barrel, pick any of the tweets and you're liable to find something to pick at.

>>12045873
he doesnt demonstrate anything really. people are just jumping onto whatever seems like the worst part of his "argument"

This is an argument so weak it doesn't even deserve debunking. His hidden premise is that there is an objective ontology of "sucking" that can not only be scientifically calculated in it's present sense but also in it's hypothetical sense as well (we can not only determine what sucks, but also what we could do instead that would suck less). The justification for this axiom is literally "it hurts to touch a stove". This isn't scientific, or philosophic, it's appeal to ignorance. He's capitalizing on people who don't know much about science or philosophy to accept his psuedo-argument as either philosophically rigid, or scientifically valid, even though neither can be said. If he really wants to talk about objective sucking he should be arguing from a place of value ethics (e.g. a negative conception of flourishing -- unsucking) or utilitarian ethics (act only in a way which produces the least suck) but he obviously hasn't read the value ethicists, who really do care where we derive these values from (none of them landed on stoves surprisingly), nor the utilitarians, who have known since the 1800's that calculations of pleasure cannot be reducible to pure analytics or some scientific method. At best, he is pitching a crippled version of rule-utillitarianism. If fleshed out into a paper, it would probably get him a B- in an ethics 100 class.
Cuck Philosophy did a detailed analysis of the Moral Landscape I can recommend for a much more detailed analysis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxalrwPNkNI&t=232s

>>12045820
Buddhist monks are usually pretty austere and don't take intoxicating substances, so if he was a strict monk, it would have been his mental strength alone.

>>12045749
Sam has gotten much worse lately, its about shilling guest books much more than real conversations. I also found his unambiguous hatred of Kavanaugh to be somewhat telling. His most recent podcast was his worst one yet.

>>12045856
Would it not tie in with "that sucked! But it was worth it?"

>>12045913
His argument hinges on getting burned being something that is universally bad under all circumstances. If being burned is not one of these universally bad things, then he needed to mention something that was

the whole thing just gets worse the more you think about it. ok im going to don some premises but they will draw out a contradiction and point to differing logical ends underneath his brain fart

so lets say there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe whose intelligence increases when humans on earth experience pain. if this intelligent life becomes intelligent enough, they will learn 'everything there is to know about physics, chemistry ... etc' and then they would know everything there is to know about making the universe suck less. would sam agree that the aliens ought to subject the whole human race to a lifetime of torture to become omniscient or not?

>>12045885
>At best, he is pitching a crippled version of rule-utillitarianism. If fleshed out into a paper, it would probably get him a B- in an ethics 100 class.
Funny you say that. It got him a PhD in neuroscience.

>>12045902
>I also found his unambiguous hatred of Kavanaugh to be somewhat telling.
Isn't Harris basically a neocon with an atheist bent? Thought that he would like the guy.

>>12045971
are you insinuating that being a neuroscientist means you know shit about philosophy?

>>12045971
No, he did his PhD thesis on "The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief", not "Stoves as the Locus of the Objective Ontology of Suck". I think he has a bachelors in philosophy though, so he still has no excuse for not reading Bentham and Mill.

>>12045765
Absolutely based

>>12046014
>when she gives you the Objective Ontology of Succ

>>12045765
There's nothing wrong with that.

“Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.” - Nietzsche

>>12046122
Said nietzsche as he got cucked by a man half his size (in both ways) and then went insane.

Nietzsche is a good brain exercise when your mind is polluted by philosophy but that's about it

>>12045788
Social contracts you goon.

>>12046165
Yikes...

>>12045979
he found his anger to be irrational

>>12045749

So rationality... Right.
What's so irrational about me getting what i want whenever and however i want it?
I think there's a good chance he might have subconsciously phrased his tweets in the first person plural ("we"). It's very telling. The assumption that we can create the best morally suitable situation is dependent on the society and civilization that we have established. But in cases of its absence, the absence of *external* inhibitions, there is no reason not to act like a beast if it best suits one's wishes. This is reminiscent of Plato's ring of gyges, or the Dark Night's joker, if you like. Harris is either unashamedly ignoring it or he's just oblivious to that, which is not much better for a supposed "intellectual" of his degree of fame and exposure.

( This is also why in my opinion all the people, as far as i know, that went to great lengths of sacrifice and risk to, say, save Jews during WW2 were all religious.)

>>12045749
It falls apart in step 3. "Suck" is a value judgment smuggled in, not a fact.

>>12045788
It's not in your biological nature. Doing evil is a conscious contrarian decision, you're not staying true to your self.

>>12045749
I stuck my hand on a stove burner and it burned rather than sucked. With this premise proven false the whole piece collapses.

>>12045979
Harris just echoes the mainstream Democrat consensus on current issues.

>>12046137
Ad Hominem, not an argument

>>12047095
Ad hominem implies irrelevance, if anon's arguing that too much theory or Nietzsche's metal state invalidate him, that is in fact an argument. It may or may not be good, but it's on you to prove that.

>>12047118
>Ad hominem implies irrelevance
no it doesn't. ad hominem literally means "to the man/person". if your counterargument is aimed at the state or character of the person making it, rather than the arguments themselves, it is by definition an ad hominem.

>>12048206
Cringe and faggotpilled
How's that for ad hominem you big baby? Now go back to sucking Nietzsche's dick

>>12048223
I wasn't even the person defending Nietzsche, I just wanted to point out you are a retard

Am I the only one that gets the impression that he’s actually extremely red pulled but plays coy to preach truths to his democratic audience? I find his whole concept of New Atheism or whatever it is obnoxious. But during many conversations he seems very quiet when things like female participation in the sciences comes up etc.

He spends most of his time fighting with leftists and their more extreme aspersions but to be frank he’s invaluable regardless of what we believe about his philosophical positions due to the fact that he’s one of the only public figures red pilling sane dems on Islam. I’ve alsi heard him make fun of polyamory in a conversation with a total polyamorous dweeb.

Thoughts?

>>12048229
You're implying that I meant what I wrote as in support of an argument hehe

>>12045933
His argument is about choosing stuff that 'suck' less though.
>>12045788
When you think about stuff you do two steps ahead, you know you should be moral. When you do moral stuff you sleep well and make other people good to you. Even psychopaths fare better when they don't kill people.

>>12045820
In deep jhanas external sensations are cut off. I've read some acvounts of masters refusing to take anaesthetics using deep meditative absorption during some medical procedures.
Also when one reaches Sotapanna one is relieved of fear of death

>>12045749
His argument only proves that I should do things which suck less for myself.

Nothing contained in his argument compels me to care about reducing suffering for other beings.

He touches on it in point 7 but not adequately. Yes in a "better" solution few things suck for other beings, but what if I just don't care? I only care about what sucks least for myself, why should I consider it better that other beings suffer less? It's not that this is a zero sum situation where I must suffer more for someone else to suffer less, it's just that I'm indifferent to the suffering of others so it's irrelevant if they suffer more.

From here he needs to give some reason why I ought to care about other beings.

>>12048467
You ought because of conscience, because helping people is pleasurable in itself, because it will make you friends that can make your life suck less.

>>12048449
>His argument is about choosing stuff that 'suck' less though
He claims:
>they don’t just suck as a matter of cultural convention or personal bias—they really and truly suck. (If you doubt this, place your hand on a hot stove and report back.)
>If we *should* to do anything in this life, we should avoid what really and truly sucks. (If you consider this question-begging, consult your stove, as above.)
>Understand how the world works (facts), so that we can avoid what sucks (values).
He claims there is stuff that 'well and truly sucks' outside any bias and we can discover what these things are, and avoid them. My counter argument is that there is no such thing as something that 'Well and truly' sucks, all these things are relative and we will never have a definitive answer, as shown by our Vietnamese friend. If getting burned is not universally 'sucky' that I really doubt anything is

>>12045749
5 is a leap innit?

The reductio ad absurdum of this line of thought is trans humanist wackos like David Pearce who thinks that technology should be mustered behind the quest to vanquish all suffering. Fuck that. Suffering is good.

>>12045749
I always put my hand on the stove to test the temp for cooking

>>12045749
Is this how brainlets think?
Kinda yikes if you ask me.

>>12045749
This wouldn't pass in Philosophy 101 (or even the equivalent logic in Mathematics 101). Think about that: it's not even logically 'valid', nevermind 'sound' (much harder requirement) and this guy wants it to form the basis of public and personal policy?

If the guy can't even get his Hume down (which is right there clearly written for him in his native tongue), how the hell will he be able to take on the premier moralist Nietzsche?

>>12047088

>Let's make factually incorrect posts!

>bad things exist, therefore we OUGHT to minimize them
>pls buy my book
Genius.

>>12048655
Literally this

>>12045885
>(we can not only determine what sucks, but also what we could do instead that would suck less)
So if we woud say Sam Harris argument sucks, could we avoid arguing by making the claim that he would suck less?

>you can't get an ought from an is
>bad this is bad, therefor we ought not do it
But you just said...
>have you tried touching a stove?

Is he being ironic or does he and the people that liked those tweets actually believe that?

>>12048741
You're witnessing the power of ideology.

>>12048741
Sam Harris fans, not only like tweets, they believe them too

>>12048755
The definition of an NPC

I like the argument he presents in The Moral Landscape. He's pretty much the best public thinker the US has at the moment.

>>12049001
Hi Sam

>>12049001
He's just another meme besides paterson, shapiro, milo, etc

>>12049017

He's a much better thinker than both

>>12045873
this set of tweets is notoriously bad.
>This is only what is - the totality of actual facts
>Many experiences suck

>>12049046
My point isn't about the quality of his work but that he won't leave any traces in the intellectual landscape

>>12049001
Chomsky? Butler?

>>12045820
He ran around screaming soon after this picture was taken.

>>12049143
But they don't have a cool podcast /s

>>12046926
Why stay true to myself?

>>12049146
There's footage, he stays put for a while then falls over

>>12045749
/4 is impossible and therefore an incorrect premise

>>12045749
>Conscious minds are natural phenomena
Proof?

>>12046902
Consult your stove

>>12048576
There will never not be suffering

>>12049146
Dude sat there for 10 minutes

>>12049201
This should be called the ‘stick your dick in an oven’ argument, for the sake of it being tangentially similar to Sam Harris’ terrible argument.

Examples of ‘stick your dick in an oven’ arguments:
-Most people don’t like being in uncomfortable situations so they try to make a lot of money to avoid them
-Most people don’t like being in dangerous situations so they own a house
-Most people don’t like to feel hungry so they stuff their faces full everyday

I’m sure you can see the problem with the ‘stick your dick in an oven’ argument, exemplified in the last point there very well. No, I don’t want to stick my dick in an oven, but it means nothing for my morality.

He didn't solve the is-ought problem, he just didn't make his ought introduction rule explicit.

His rule is that conscious experience is what is important. This rule cannot be derived from anything that "is" . It just makes sense from our perspective since we are conscious ourselves.

>>12045749
He reasons incorrectly starting at incorrect assumptions all the way to incorrect conclusions. What else is there to say?

>>12049201
http://i.4cdn.org/b/1541686857944.webm

>>12049696
Can Harris recover from this?

>>12045749
>1
Unnecessary, here's a much easier way of getting from an """"""""is""""""" to an """""""ought""""""
1)x is
2)It follows grammatically that, since x is, x ought to do whatever x ought to do
The fissuring of facts and values is a bizarre anglo invention. You can't assume that there are no oughts in the universe because they're are demonstratively facts which consist of propositional attitudes (i.e. values) and trying to trying to ignore these just leads you to ignore a major constituent of reality.
>2
Sure, but what grants these conscious minds any kind of unity. If they are only susceptible to "experiences" (whatever that means, especially since he's introduced the bizarre notion of a modal/non-actual experience, rather than simply a modal or non actual fact, without justifying this at all), then what is there to tie these experiences together in any kind of intelligable way. If there is no intelligence-derived unity to life how then can we conceive of it in moral terms.
>3
uwwuguwwug it sucks, anglos are fucking literal children. If you're making big boi claims about your moral system being descriptive, then you should be able to account for the fact that almost every single moral actor in the universe is willing to undergo experiences that "suck" at the drop of a hat when they feel they are morally justified in doing so. I mean, obviously his reply will be that in most cases they're just acting according to what are more or less spooks, but clearly there's more to deciding whether experiences just "suck" in and of themselves, than me sticking my hand on a hot stove. Tell buddhist monks that set themselves on fire that all they're doing is experiencing something that "really and truly sucks" and see if they have some kind of moment of clarity and convert to the scientific religion. Cultural and personal conventions define all experience,especially bad experience, because all experience is concept- and theory-laden. there is no pure examinable object we could call experience abstractable from this matrix.
>4
They are natural phenomena, yes. But that doesnt mean you can give a complete account of them in terms of mechanical causes. Even if science could in principle give such a complete account (pro tip: it cant), the immensity of facts it would need to collect is makes pursuing a complete science of behaviour without reference to propositional attitudes completely impractical and literally impossible.
We also can't know everything about these fields, because all science is in principle revisable if the assumptions on which prior experiments have been based turn out even mildly wrong at a fundamental enough level, which considering the immense number of facts on which even the most modest experiment is based is always a distinct possibility. to which this ben stiller cunt might say hurr durr well its good enough, but clearly it isnt for your purposes, since you want it to be able to generate causal chains with law-like accuracy

>>12045749
>5
except, it is question begging, because people dont universally experience these "sucky" experiences as bad. and you need to do some legwork to convince people that they are.
>6
Except my life can suck literally from beginning to end, and I can arrive at the end and say "well, that sucked from beginning to end, but it was worth it, because i lived as a good person according to x or y moral schema *dies*.
That such a thing is possible absolutely obliterates your point about how intuitively intrinsic the hedonistic calculus is.
>7
he's also marshalling the word "suck" as a rhetorical device, deliberately infantilizing his point so you don't scrutinize it. call it what it is, a hedonistic calculus. pain and pleasure are discrete, measurable things, which everyone has an instinsic sense of the value/non-value of. this has been absolutely yeeted on even by utilitarians for 200 years but if you mask the fact you're relying on that position then you don't have to respond to what people have said about it, do you ben
>8
this says absolutely nothing. aside from the fact that its entirely negative and only tells you what you should avoid and nothing about what you should aspire to, he fundamentally misunderstands the fact-value distinction, and the problems of moving from the logic connecting facts to statements about propositional attitudes if you understand these as two distinct categories, (which is a retarded thing to do anyway, but hey ho)
suck my fucking dick you night at the museum fuck, you're fucking wrong about everything and if you had even the slightest education outside your narrow field you'd immediately realize that.

>>12045749
I've had better pseudo intellectual arguments than that when I was in 6th grade

>>12049696
This is a blue board, my dude.

>>12049962
>>12049696
i clicked out of it, what was it?

>>12045749
You can drug someone and make it so it doesn't "suck" to burn their hand.

>>12045749
>but can any of you actually formally refute this?
Ethics =/= pain. There, refuted.

I can tell -- when a person is attempting to

1 / increase *visibility* via twitter
or
(and here's the kicker)
2 / spam screenshots on auxiliary sites in order to -- and this is obvious -- produce the same effects.

>>12045856
It basically is, look at point 7. There's countless refutations to this kind of thinking already, so one needn't bother with Harris.

>>12045749
>but can any of you actually formally refute this?
Easily. He loves returning to that touching a hot stove example - -ever hear that the burned hand teaches best? Pain, or sucking as he calls it, is useful, and by no means necessarily bad. He jumps from is to ought both with the concept of the term suck in 2), and with its application in 5). There's plenty of other things in that absurd tweet that he is asserting without evidence also, but that's secondary.

>>12045902
>>Sam has gotten much worse lately, its about shilling guest books much more than real conversations.
This is what happens to all these 'public intellectuals' once they get established, be it Harris or Peterson or even that black science guy. What you have to understand is that it was about commercialism from the first, and hopefully you can understand that now that some of the pretensions have peeled away.

>>12045749
I put my dick on a hot stove and it didn't get sucked at all, only burned. I'm currently in the process of litigation against Harris.

>>12049922
>>12049922
>>12049922
>>12049922

>he's also marshalling the word "suck" as a rhetorical device, deliberately infantilizing his point so you don't scrutinize it.
This is something he does all the time to make his ethical "arguments" and people fall for it every single time. His premise is absurd to begin with!!

>>12045749
What's it with pseuds and arguing from trivial examples.

>>12045749
What if not killing people sucks for me, and so much so that I derive more satisfaction from it than those living do from living, including those contingent upon their lives?
checkmate pseud harris

>>12045749
>have fetish for burning myself
>argument completely eats shit

And people pay money for his opinions.