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Moral realism - basic Q
Answer by KempJul 21, 20254-2

For those who give significant weight to the possibility that morals are real, in the "actually have some effect on the universe" sense...

This sense of "real" is contested in contemporary philosophy. As a sketch, here are a few things that are often considered quite plausible:

  1. There are abstract objects and abstract facts
    1. Plausible examples: numbers (or sets), shapes, propositions
  2. Abstract objects are real
  3. Moral facts are abstract facts

If (1-3) are plausible, then it's also plausible that (4) moral facts are real. I'm not exactly offering this as an argument, but merely a set of (what contemporary philosophers consider to be, at least) plausible theses. A philosopher who accepts (4) will usually be referred to as a moral non-naturalist. 

What IS it, if not "just" our beliefs and preferences about each others' behaviors?

This is an interesting question for moral non-naturalists; but they would respond that this question is no more mysterious for morality than it is for mathematics (or any other abstract domain). And they'd certainly reject that moral facts (and mathematical facts) are "just" reflections of our beliefs and preferences. 

I find the premise that it's anything but a social consensus of human preferences to be ... incoherent.

Of course, many philosophers will reject 1-4 above, as well as this thought of yours. Such philosophers think that moral facts simply reduce to natural facts. E.g., facts about wrongness reduce to facts about units of pain, in the same way that facts about water reduce to facts about H2O. If they're right about that, then all we need to do is figure out how to measure pain-units -- or whatever natural property morality corresponds to.

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Plato's Trolley
Kemp3mo10

On the other hand, it's possible that objective morality exists but is not empirically obtainable knowledge in nature. If that was the case, the only other way I can imagine for that knowledge to work is by some kind of enlightenment or grace - an inherent inner knowledge that we all possess, or can possess if we achieve the right state of mind, not from observation of the outside world, but by introspection.


Mathematical knowledge is not empirical. By your reasoning, does mathematical knowledge therefore “work by some kind of enlightenment or grace”? 

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Notes on spaced repetition scheduling
Kemp3mo10

How many such cards do you usually make? In theory, there's an infinite number of forms for card content Z. And I personally find it too costly (cognitive effort, time) during card creation to brainstorm the various ways in which I might encounter Z in the future. 

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Notes on spaced repetition scheduling
Kemp3mo10

I've recently been wondering whether introducing randomness to flashcard content might also improve... something

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What is David Chapman talking about when he talks about "meaning" in his book "Meaningness"?
Kemp3mo32

Let me try:

On a busy sidewalk, your eyes lock for an instant with those of a cute stranger coming toward you, and then they pass. You stop and look back over your shoulder and see that they have done the same. You can see that this is purposeful—even if it’s not exactly clear what it's purpose is—and an attentive third person would see the same.

Hmm

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Debate experiments at The Curve, LessOnline and Manifest
Kemp4mo30

Good post!

Another way to diminish/remove status from debates is to shift from adversarial to collaborative modes. I'd like to see more experiments on "collaborative" debates. Here's an idea, pulling from this community: Crux Speedruns. Participants with opposing view on A must work together to find the crux of their disagreement as quickly as possible. Their team's time is added to the speedrun leaderboard. 

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How LLM Beliefs Change During Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Kemp4mo30

Interesting, thanks for the work and the writeup. Two naive questions:

  1. Imagine we were able to run this experiment on humans. Introspectively, when reasoning through problems I often find myself "jumping" between potential solutions. For example, say you're testing my beliefs about the optimal next move in a game of chess. If you truncated my chain of thought by the same method used here, would we also be tempted to say that my beliefs are "wildly fluctuating"?
  2. Related to the first question: on what grounds do we consider some intermediate element of a chain of reasoning to be belief? Here's a reason why we might not: beliefs are generally thought of as stored cognitive dispositional states of system. The stored dispositional states of LLMs are encoded in its weights. Weights aren't changing during inference time. So: beliefs aren't changing during the chain of thought.

Thanks

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20Trying to understand Hanson's Cultural Drift argument
1y
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