/lit/ - Literature

>>6359772

>>6359772

Never

>>6359772
He thinks Buddhism is more than just superstitious woo woo.

He was wrong about Chomsky.

>>6359902
He thinks meditation can have positive effects, which scientific literature corroborates.

He explicitly denied the superstitious/supernatural aspects of Buddhism.

>>6359905
What did he have to say about Chomsky, a vastly more important and influential scientist, philosopher and intellectual than him?

>>6359905
>>6359924
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBwpukN7Pf8

tldr Chomsky is naive

>>6359902
it is more

>>6359924
Dispute about materialism vs. idealism, basically. Chomsky was the former and sees New Atheism as a hamsterwheel distracting from class issues, whereas Harris of course does not and sees the world's ills as a product of religion, not capitalism.

>>6359772

Is/Ought?

Sam Harris is a confirmed faggot, New Gaytheist charlatan, peddling his own brand of naturalist-new ageist bullshit via psychadelics and nonsense meditation.

He's an intellectual lightweight and a true cocksucker.

>>6359902
>woo woo
If you say this for any reason other than as a cute word for vagina then you're a fag

>>6360034
You could've just said you didn't like him because Reddit likes him

It would've saved a lot of time

>>6359772
Asserts that religion is some magical social phenomenon that actually acts through people and not just a variety of identifiable associations learned through social habituation.

Asserts that religious memes can be identified and delimited without respect to the other cultural memes that sustain them. If you make an atheist critique of religion, saying that it should no longer exist, that critique is itself proof of its existence the moment it enters public discourse. In other words memes are not cannot simply be distinguished when it comes to communicative activity.

tl;dr -> Harris is noob at thinking

>>6360058
Please expand in both of these points because I have no fucking idea of what you're trying to say but you seem smart, and rec books on the subject

>>6360079
memes, son

>>6360079
1. point
Religion is not something that exists in itself, it is just a category into which we attempt to locate a large variety of associations we get from the behavior and communication of groups and individuals. If all humans were to dissappear today no religion would exist (unless you ask religious people of course) and all the religious artifacts in culture would mean nothing, since they needed human activity to deploy any specific meaning. Without people a church is just a structure, and all texts that describe it as being otherwise will have no one to read them.
Social habituation is the process by which humans, as organisms endowed with consciousness, learn and sustain the various responses given to the variety of stimuli that their specific place in culture consists of. Everything is learned through different forms of habituation, this is a biological fact. Social habituation is a term used to describe processes in culture that seem to make uniform what groups of people learn. Television for example is a uniforming medium in that sense. It doesn't matter what people thought about Breaking Bad, everyone saw it and so they share a frame of cultural reference and can be said to have gone through a process of social habituation.
For this i can recommend "Toward an Ecology of Mind" by Gregory Bateson

>>6360107
What?
This is all pointless language games though, good job you understand that religion is a person-bound construct, now this doesn't change anything.
I feel like you don't understand what Sam Harris is about, he isn't even an anti-theist.
His best friend is a religious Muslim.

>>6360079
2. point
The great problem of meme-theory although it is based on biology and does have some great ideas, is that it has not been possible thus far to situate memes as more than just associations. We see relations between ideas in culture, but these relations are of different quality and many of them cannot be explained empirically because they are simply associations that we get when we think we see similarities. As we know from neuroscience (Damasio) the human brain is extremely capable of finding similarities and systems even when there are non. What meme theory needs, but has neglected to integrate is presicely a concept of social habituation, which is ironic since Dawkins actually draws alot on Bateson in his development of the concept. Where he goes wrong is that in the end he manages to highlight the meme itself as being the thing to look for, so that we can only identify by means of association. What he should have done, atleast in my opinion, was to impliment Batesons notion of the bit and accept that the word meme is just a label that collects and thus generalizes a variety of mechanisms. If we start at the meme, then we will fail to grasp the mechanisms of habituation that produced it. We may say that evangelist christians adhere to a sub-variety of christian memes, but then we neglect the economic, historical and social relations that made that specific form of christianity viable to those people. If we actually collected such detailed info we would realize that we could not even call them a sub-group and that it is pointless to make a direct connection between them as one meme and another type of christianity as another meme.
Meme-theory functions top-down looking at abstract communication, but social formations are created bottoms-up by different kinds of necessities.
A meme is what Latour calls an intermediary and that is why will recommend his book "Reassembling the Social"

>>6360034
>Is/Ought?

"I’ve now had these basic objections hurled at me a thousand different ways—from YouTube comments that end by calling me “a Mossad agent” to scarcely more serious efforts by scientists like Sean Carroll which attempt to debunk my reasoning as circular or otherwise based on unwarranted assumptions. Many of my critics piously cite Hume’s is/ought distinction as though it were well known to be the last word on the subject of morality until the end of time. Indeed, Carroll appears to think that Hume’s lazy analysis of facts and values is so compelling that he elevates it to the status of mathematical truth:

'Attempts to derive ought from is are like attempts to reach an odd number by adding together even numbers. If someone claims that they’ve done it, you don’t have to check their math; you know that they’ve made a mistake.

This is an amazingly wrongheaded response coming from a very smart scientist. I wonder how Carroll would react if I breezily dismissed his physics with a reference to something Robert Oppenheimer once wrote, on the assumption that it was now an unmovable object around which all future human thought must flow. Happily, that’s not how physics works. But neither is it how philosophy works. Frankly, it’s not how anything that works, works."

--Sam Harris

http://www.project-reason.org/newsfeed/item/moral_confusion_in_the_name_of_science3/#sthash.utLOrsrZ.dpuf

>>6359772
No, he hasn't. I cannot think of a single instance where he would have disagreed with me.

>>6360140
>>6360124
>>6360107
I'm too high for this shit.

>>6360118
Thanks, too bad Sam Harris doesn't understand that religion is a "person-bound construct"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxkq5bHe_fA

Good for him by the way, that he has friends...

>>6360037
>fag

if you say this for any other reason than as British slang for cigarettes then you're a moron

Sients gan gibe us morality guis, I swer

Now pls buy my boogs :DDDD

>>6360506
Yeah that guy's a cigarette and I just smoked him ;)

My problem with Sam Harris is that he wants to cram ideology into science to suit his political views. He's pretty clearly waving the banner of "guys, let's become organized like theists and associate atheism with tangential stereotypes of rationality and humanism to make our own little subculture". I'm firmly a monist materialist, but this shit would literally ruin the attempt at neutrality that makes scientific methodology worth anything in terms of being instrumental. It reeks of Deepak Chopra's usage of muh quantum physics to seem intelligent in the eyes of plebs.

>>6360140
>Calls Hume lazy
>Tiptoes around the question and does nothing to bridge prescriptive and descriptive other than invoke SCIENCE HAS CHANGED

>>6359772
>>6360591
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj9oB4zpHww
> 18:30
> "Scientific community, in its infinite wisdom, can converge on notions of human morality that will ultimately lessen human suffering; science can prove right and wrong just as it proved how disease spreads."
> STANDING O PARADIGM SHIFT OMG
> British man comes onstage and asks three lucid questions
> Argument collapses under moralistic assumptions

'Moral' of the story, kids: if you do take large quantities of ecstasy in the woods, don't come out pushing your moral system on the world.

>>6360595
>Tiptoes around the question
The question is bunk because Hume's is/ought is just a linguistic babble, and he doesn't realize the semantic concept of 'ought' is on a higher order of abstraction that the concept of 'is'.

It's like a car manufacturer advertising that their car goes from 0-60 in however many seconds, and Hume wandering in saying, "but muh Zeno: there are an infinite halfway points so a car can never reach sixty miles an hour. No one can solve my car/speed problem."

>>6360595
>spoonfeed me objections to something that's been objected to for hundreds of years
>oh btw I'm super philosophically sophisticated
>something those atheist scientists forgot about in their brain experiments
>lmao

>>6360591
He's trying to account for all religion and meditation from a scientific point of view, reducing it to mechanistic force like how life was reduce to evolution. It's a poor attempt, for sure, but hey, he's trying.

>>6360648
What ought to be the case is that there be the maximum number of tennis balls possible. Is there some experiment that refutes this view? (now substitute 'amount of flourishing of conscious creatures' for 'number of tennis balls')

> the semantic concept of 'ought' is on a higher order of abstraction that the concept of 'is'
>Hume's is/ought is just a linguistic babble
> ...

Good troll thread OP, it makes /lit/ go apeshit every time. Well meme'd

>>6360793
You need to explain why an ought cannot be simply assumed in science.

Then you move on to proving the is/ought distinction.

Most objectors don't seem to realize this, and in their hubris jump to the second step. But you can't simply leap over an intellectual giant.

>>6360874
It can be assumed, but to do so without justification would be a dogma, something Harris claims to be dislike.

>>6360874
>But you can't simply leap over an intellectual giant.

Unless the giant is lying down.

>>6360908
>It can be assumed, but to do so without justification would be a dogma, something Harris claims to be dislike.

The point is that depending on your philosophical axioms, the is/ought gap doesn't matter.

If you believe in God, you do not care about the is/ought gap, because you have faith. Similarly, as Harris has said that, the moment you acknowledge(i.e accept the axiom), that pain and suffering deals with real world problems, and that there are real world answers to those problems, morality becomes the domain of science.

So it is form of consequentialist ethics, that he argues for very well.

>>6359772
All the freakin' time.

He's just an evangelist. That's why he targets believers who don't believe every word of the Bible is literal and penned by God himself, because their faith is based on something stronger and more pliable. This bothers him, so the people who are the most open minded and decent about it are the ones he says are the worst.

If that ain't evangelism, I don't know what is.

Yes, I know this is a b8 thread, especially given the day it is.

>>6360648
The is-ought problem arises when we become aware that the instinctive and sentimental drives generating our goals are not "knowledge", but personal reflections, lacking the empirical origins that descriptive observations possess. It's this dissonance between the status quo and normative sentiment that enables the latter to motivate behavioral changes in order to affect the former; we recognize our prescriptive will can be entirely at odds with competing persons, despite often being able to agree with them on empirical descriptions.

We can see this element of subjectivity at every level of ethical discussion. It's no coincidence that murder is widely considered to be wrong because humans have an instinctive fear of death, or that adultery is called immoral because it creates insecurities about bonding. We don't talk about current ethical dilemmas unfolding on the moon because it's devoid of life; there are no moral judgments to make about rocks without subjective experience. Even if the long-standing sentiment shared by all people was common enough to establish a global morality (it's not), being universal wouldn't make it objective. It'd be widespread, but still subject-dependent.

>he doesn't realize the semantic concept of 'ought' is on a higher order of abstraction that the concept of 'is'.

For someone who complains about linguistic babble, you sure like mentioning a throwaway reference to the crux of your argument without any further elaboration as to how it's valid. Same as Harris.

>It's like a car manufacturer advertising that their car goes from 0-60 in however many seconds, and Hume wandering in saying, "but muh Zeno: there are an infinite halfway points so a car can never reach sixty miles an hour. No one can solve my car/speed problem."

The is/ought problem and Zeno's paradoxes are entirely different. Your analogy fails in that you haven't established how normative statements are composed of smaller, descriptive elements. Not to mention that speed and acceleration are quantifiable variables we can actually measure and compare; nobody has created a reliable, empirical methodology for "observing" good and bad, or even defining them in a sound and valid manner. That's kinda important in science, bro.

>>6360648
Color me wrong but isn't is/ought meant like how something is in relation to how something should be?

>>6360693
>spoonfeed me objections to something that's been objected to for hundreds of years

Yes, if you want to debate, you're expected to bring your own arguments. Your opponent won't research them for you. Arguments can persist over long periods of time without any historically popular answers being satisfactory. Complaining that your opponent wants to be "spoon fed" is the laziest fucking excuse you can ever have in a debate. People don't want to spend an hour looking up some shit you vaguely referenced in your arrogant assumption that they'll come to the same conclusion you did when exposed to it.

>oh btw I'm super philosophically sophisticated

Something I never said, but I get it, you're trying to make me look like a fag as a red herring in discussion.

>something those atheist scientists forgot about in their brain experiments

I'm an atheist and a science student. New Atheist media whores are not paragons of science; the pseudoscience of memetics purported by Dawkins shows that well enough. I just disagree with Harris' retarded idea that normative claims can be derived from science, which isn't supported by the consensus of neuroscientists whatsoever.

>>6360874
>>6360932
So he assumes as basic a controversial moral theory and a controversial theory of well being and I'm supposed to be impressed?

If you want to read an intellectual giant and actually learn something about ethics, read Reasons & Persons.

>>6360972
>Color me wrong but isn't is/ought meant like how something is in relation to how something should be?

Generally it means:

A. Is. A five year old girl is tied down and raped by a fifty year old man.
B. Ought. As a society we ought to regard this act as bad/evil/wrong/other word to denote negative.

You can't get from A to B.


Harris claims that getting from A to B isn't a problem because society is capable of forming a very complex structure based on empirical observation, then taking that structure and internally tagging things as for or against 'human flourishing'.

Harris' critics argue that this is over-simplistic and the problem of is/ought remains for anyone who doesn't agree with his inter-subjective model.

Harris counters by saying that is/ought is a bullshit linguistic game that's only a problem to some philosophy nerds and not to real world situations. He also argues that following the philosophy language game, it's impossible to objectively verify that Hume even existed to create the Is/ought problem in the first place.

>>6361011
>So he assumes

Yes he does, but he tries to convince people that his axioms are more succinct in the world we live in than religious axioms or other axioms that are built around ambiguous philosophical rules.

I highly suggest you read the Moral Landscape. I don't even agree with him, but he is a very smart guy.

>>6361071
>You can't get from A to B.

Of course you can. It depends on your values.

What Hume said is that you cannot get there just by empiricism alone, which is a vastly different thing altogether.

>>6361101
I highly suggest you read Reasons & Persons (esp. Part IV) to see why those axioms aren't going to be satisfactory.

And presumably succinctness (I'm not sure what the 'in the world we live in' is doing) shouldn't be the only criterion for practical axioms, or else 'Do whatever' would be a better theory than almost any other. And 'maximize suffering' would be just as good an axiom as 'maximize pleasure'.

>>6361127
>I highly suggest you read Reasons & Persons (esp. Part IV) to see why those axioms aren't going to be satisfactory.

I will read it if you recommend it.

But please read Harris aswell, instead of only listening to the butthurt Humedrones in this thread.

Harris is dumb. He looks at polling data and current events in the "Muslim world" without having any real knowledge or understanding of history (both in the Middle East and North Africa, and in the modernization of Christianity) or cultures (which are distinct and plenty in MENA) and thinks he can just assign all blame to Islam. But religious beliefs are not platonic ideals that hover above people and cause violence, and the sooner Harris realizes that the sooner he'll stop getting wrecked by Noam Chomsky.

>>6361071
>A. Is. A five year old girl is tied down and raped by a fifty year old man.
>B. Ought. As a society we ought to regard this act as bad/evil/wrong/other word to denote negative.
Ought doesn't exist. There's only is and other forms of the verb to be, and the philosophical problems of those.

A. Is. A five year old girl IS tied down and raped by a fifty year old man.
B. Is. As a society we ARE regarding this act as bad/evil/wrong/other word to denote negative.
C. Is. a minority of society IS regarding this act as good/right/other word to denote positive.
D. Is. A Governing body IS trying to catch and punish these rapists.
E. Is. Someone IS moaning that "ought" ought to be brought into the equation.
F. Is. These people are ignored, and policies ARE still based on empirical observation, economic trends, social pressures and other forms of IS.

>>6360008
For fuck's sake, Sam Harris cannot even use adverbs. I like how high-level retardation dovetails with very basic retardation here.