Pigliucci's comment on Yudkowsky's and Dai's stance on morality and logic

mapnoterritory

So morality has a lot to do with logic — indeed I have argued that moral reasoning is a type of applied logical reasoning — but it is not logic “all the way down,” it is anchored by certain contingent facts about humanity, bonoboness and so forth.

But, despite Yudkowsky’s confident claim, morality isn’t a matter of logic “all the way down,” because it has to start with some axioms, some brute facts about the type of organisms that engage in moral reasoning to begin with. Those facts don’t come from physics (though, like everything else, they better be compatible with all the laws of physics), they come from biology. A reasonable theory of ethics, then, can emerge only from a combination of biology (by which I mean not just evolutionary biology, but also cultural evolution) and logic.

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.de/2013/01/lesswrong-on-morality-and-logic.html

Pigliucci:

So morality has a lot to do with logic — indeed I have argued that moral reasoning is a type of applied logical reasoning — but it is not logic “all the way down,” it is anchored by certain contingent facts about humanity, bonoboness and so forth.

But, despite Yudkowsky’s confident claim, morality isn’t a matter of logic “all the way down,” because it has to start with some axioms, some brute facts about the type of organisms that engage in moral reasoning to begin with. Those facts don’t come from physics (though, like everything else, they better be compatible with all the laws of physics), they come from biology. A reasonable theory of ethics, then, can emerge only from a combination of biology (by which I mean not just evolutionary biology, but also cultural evolution) and logic.

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.de/2013/01/lesswrong-on-morality-and-logic.html

Culture isn't biological, though I get what he means, culture is an inherent byproduct of intelligent life. But culture itself is an axiom built on a singular intelligence. This singular, relative intelligence comes first. You don't experience through the minds of society, but only your own mind. Think about the idiocy in your own mind putting the minds of others before itself. It makes no logical sense. If you want to argue of a "greater good", which for the most part is fluff, it's basically arguing from a hivemind point of view. A mind coming from all collectively Let's take a look at this mind: it's composed of a number of very different minds. To any sane person this mind would appear batshit crazy Now imagine of one mind took over all of the others in this hivemind. That's sanity

No matter which point you argue from, logic is nothing but a higher form of selfishness