Craig Biddle vs Alex O'Connor

Ethics
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12 minutes ago, whYNOT said:

The proposition - unlimited lifespan - rests on the premise that man’s consciousness would also be identically and accordingly “unlimited”.

However, the mind possesses “identity” - a *nature*.

Sensory, perceptual, volitional, conceptual,value-assessing, a subconscious, and psycho-physiological (emotionality), the entirety based on the biological: brain and nervous system. 

Over-riding or denying the mind’s total nature, reality and existence, is the very meaning of IR-rationality.

Rand: "Values are the motivating power of man’s actions and a necessity of his survival, psychologically as well as physically.

Man’s values control his subconscious emotional mechanism that functions like a computer adding up his desires, his experiences, his fulfillments and frustrations—like a sensitive guardian watching and constantly assessing his relationship to reality". AR

“…his survival, psychologically as well as physically”.

What I think would cause immense psychological harm, (mind-body)self-alienation, etc.,etc., if not also, “existential angst”, would be the attempt to ~stretch~ consciousness (like a muscle), beyond its subconscious ‘value-limits’. Instead of the beneficial, intended prolonging of one’s happiness via a (long-)prolonged lifespan the result would be misery and contemplation of an end, well before the life-extension limits of the body.

 

 

So.. yes? In the context of the thought experiment, emotionalism becomes the guide of action. An indestructible form of being would not act ‘out of reason’ , perhaps psychologically whim worship is rooted in an implicit idea of immortality, consequence-less actions have no effects and none meaningfully deleterious.

 

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I think if you where a person that could not die..
It would be reasonable and moral to invent/discover a deathpill. If we still had the pshyque of a human as we know of today.

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Thought experiments in which one imagines a frictionless plane for simplification and approximation to reality are a far cry from imagining surfaces of matter having friction and rubbing against each other and not generating heat or wear. An endlessly functioning machine or living organism is like that latter imagination. It invites one to imagine all the ways in which thermodynamics manifest in a machine or organism as not applying.* Such imagining as that is mental junk.

What about a machine or organism designed by us to last a billion years in its functioning, overcoming for that long all issues of wear and failure modes of materials, issues of energy reception and transformation, and issues of failures in self-repair abilities. Lets imagine also that its human designers structure its operations according to value rankings and value interconnections put into the machine’s or organism’s self-controller of its operations. And give it abilities lasting for a billion years that prevent it from falling into boredom or depression.

It could be said that such values are vicarious values in that they reflect design goals of its human designers, and those designers had authentic values. So here we could say that the vicarious values of the artificial machine or artificial organism required the life and values of its human designers. In this imagined case, as in our own construction in nature, value requires life and rightly conceptually presupposes life (the designers’ lives and their intelligence).

In the case of organism, the artificial organism imagined here, does it have authentic values on account of being alive? No. Not during its first interval, which is a billion years long. For during that interval of life, it is incapable of dying. That is not real life and those are not authentic values, which obtain only for real life, which is to say, only for life under the continual potential for death.

 

 

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23 hours ago, tadmjones said:

 perhaps psychologically whim worship is rooted in an implicit idea of immortality, consequence-less actions have no effects and none meaningfully deleterious.

 

Going back to the neo-mystics, secularists who had to give up on “Eternal Life”, there’s their way out: immortality through the means of ‘science’ - i.e. whim-worship. 

The notion “Death is a disease” seemed to me to only arrive quite recently, in this intellectually post-modernist and post-religionist era. 

25

I don’t think “immortality” is achievable.

I think “agelessness” may be achievable, meaning that one’s body would never grow old, but if you don’t die of old age or the illnesses that go with it, there are still plenty of other things that can kill you.

I don’t think agelessness would change anything as far as philosophy is concerned. Life would still be conditional, ethics would still be necessary.

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Value has only a practical context for each individual and ethics is concerned with a context centered around ‘other’ and at root is hypothetical.

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52 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

ethics is concerned with a context centered around ‘other’

That’s not true according to Objectivism. The “social” conception of ethics is that you wouldn’t need ethics if you were alone on an island, but Ayn Rand wrote (I’m paraphrasing here) that in fact a deserted island is where you would need ethics the most, because you wouldn’t be able to shift the cost of your mistakes to anybody else.

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I think she said you would need morality on a desert island, a guide to identifying values and the actions needed to gain and or keep them. I’ve always ‘heard’ ethics as being closer to politics or interactions with others than a normative standard for actions concerning self. Though the practicing of a proper ethical code when called for would obviously benefit the self, among others. :slight_smile:

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57 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

I think she said you would need morality on a desert island, a guide to identifying values and the actions needed to gain and or keep them. I’ve always ‘heard’ ethics as being closer to politics or interactions with others than a normative standard for actions concerning self. Though the practicing of a proper ethical code when called for would obviously benefit the self, among others. :slight_smile:

Tad, you are right that treatment of others is routinely taken as the center of ethics. You get that presumption a lot even among researchers doing anthropology and the emergence of ethics in human history. And ethics is close to the religious beliefs and tying together of tribes and chiefdoms. That is central to what was going on in Hawaii with sacrificing individuals by throwing them into a volcano. 

But necrovore is right. Rand shook up the modern assumption, and her illustration of morality for an individual stranded on a deserted island was the topper. He needs to practice rationality to best survive, and she had argued that surviving at the human level is the proper standard of value. Since the castaway is not in the company of other humans, some of the virtues under rationality do not apply so obviously as when he is in society. Rand ended with some virtues such as pride and the value of self-esteem that were getting little advertisement as virtues in modern times.

With the ancient Greeks, Rand’s shakeup with the ethics philosophers would not seem to be so urgent. The Epicureans had lists of good practices, and they are centered on the well-being of the agent. The eudaimonic ethics so Aristotle was centered on the highest happiness of the agent. Rand’s view is not of that stripe, for her ethics is biocentric, not happiness-centric, most fundamentally. And unlike the Epicurean’s, Rand’s is not centered on avoiding pain and attaining serenity at the ethical system’s most fundamental level.

In my own view, Rand’s look at the man on the deserted island did not reach far enough into that human situation. My own look at that situation is different than hers, but she was on a good path to some serious rethinking of the place and layers of ethics in human existence. 

Quote

 

Rand had proposed that the virtue of rationality is not only virtue in a social setting, but virtue—main moral virtue—for a castaway on a deserted island. This is because in the isolated setting rationality is necessary to the individual’s survival. That is so, however, I say that enabling survival is not the only source of the goodness of rationality. There is a person on that island: the castaway. Rationality is proper responsiveness to and continuation of his self. It is call of life in that life form that is his personal self that is the distinctively moral in the virtue of rationality for a castaway.

Though the castaway carries along other in foundational frame, he is now the only human present. He is an end-in-himself with much rightness to continue himself. (A pet might go a ways for fulfilling the need to love and interact with another human self.) Returned to society, an individual remains an end-in-himself rightly making his life, a fully human life with interactions and mutual values and interactions with the other ends-in-themselves that are human selves at centers of making lives.

 

—Stephen

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4 hours ago, necrovore said:

I don’t think “immortality” is achievable.

I think “agelessness” may be achievable, meaning that one’s body would never grow old, but if you don’t die of old age or the illnesses that go with it, there are still plenty of other things that can kill you.

I don’t think agelessness would change anything as far as philosophy is concerned. Life would still be conditional, ethics would still be necessary.

Yes sure - back to reality. I ‘entertained’ “the immortal human” notion to test the extremes of consciousness, but - biologically - doubtful to impossible, it’s going to be achievable. A reasonable estimate I read on the eventual optimum age may be about the 150+ year mark. But at any age, ageing must still come into play; a body/brain won’t go from agelessly healthy to deceased in a single stage. Especially in their middle to later years, I have certainty that those future men and women will need philosophy/ethics/individual rights more than ever!  

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Copy- paste from the lexicon didn’t work, but the passage reprinted in For The New Intellectual pg 127 from GS uses the term morality. And that is the phrasing I remembered , so the phrasing was also the one used. The context was big ‘o’ Objectivism , so her phrasing is pertinent.

My having always ‘heard’ is my interpretation of O’ism, perhaps I have drawn a distinction without a difference, but then again specific terms carry much weight in O’ism , so I think I’m more right lol.

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You guys are dropping the context of the technology of  mind transfer. A specific physical body is irrelevant in that context, and so is any needed medical advancements and anything else healthwise. You can’t drop the context of near future realistic technology.

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5 hours ago, EC said:

…the technology of  mind transfer. A specific physical body is irrelevant

WHO is that person after a  “mind transfer”?

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8 hours ago, whYNOT said:

WHO is that person after a  “mind transfer”?

The same person in a cloned, synthetic, or quantum computer. When I say “mind transfer”, I mean with the same continuation of consciousness. True, mind/body is not a dichotomy, but one starts in the new “body” with the same mind/continuation of consciousness that one had in the last Plank Time moment that existed prior to the mind transfer. For same continuation of consciousness that is what is required.

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2 hours ago, EC said:

The same person in a cloned, synthetic, or quantum computer. When I say “mind transfer”, I mean with the same continuation of consciousness. True, mind/body is not a dichotomy, but one starts in the new “body” with the same mind/continuation of consciousness that one had in the last Plank Time moment that existed prior to the mind transfer. For same continuation of consciousness that is what is required.

You say it as if the new body, would be in complete allignment with the old one?
I understand what you are trying to say here, but how can this be coherent?
 

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2 hours ago, EC said:

The same person in a cloned, synthetic, or quantum computer. When I say “mind transfer”, I mean with the same continuation of consciousness. True, mind/body is not a dichotomy, but one starts in the new “body” with the same mind/continuation of consciousness that one had in the last Plank Time moment that existed prior to the mind transfer. For same continuation of consciousness that is what is required.

Lets say that you would teleport, and split all your atoms up, and put them back together again.
Is it now obvious that this is the exact same person?

37

Immortal does not mean a potentially limitless life expectancy, it means the absolute impossibility of dying. But this immortality must be unconditional, otherwise it means that we can destroy the conditions of immortality, and we are still mortal. Unless we maintain that the conditions of immortality would themselves be indestructible, unalterable. For the moment, I don’t see how we can go from our biology where everything is in motion to something that could not be subject to any change. It appears in violation to the laws of the universe. And there is more: all this would even mean that our (unconditional) immortality would go beyond any future state of the universe!  It would be impervious to any kind of “end of the world” (for example a very distant future where there would only be black holes). Orherwise we are still mortal.

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38

Suppose you read a newspaper, and turn a page. In the course of that, a number of molecules are abraded off the newspaper. Is it the same newspaper, or did it become a different newspaper? Suppose a person clips a toenail: is that now a different person, or is it the same person? Suppose a person forgets the name of a person they met 5 years ago: does that loss of memory make them a different person? This discussion hinges on the concept “same”, but omits measurement.

If a pleasant and intelligent person is transported and thereby becomes a snarling anthropoid beast, I would accept that they are not the same person. I posit that James T. Kirk was always the same person after being transported. For this discussion to be productive, we have to have some idea of what sameness of conscience is. At this technological point, we have no reason to make any assertion on that issue regarding transporters and similar sci-fi notions one way or the other.

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13 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

 For this discussion to be productive, we have to have some idea of what sameness of conscience is.

“..sameness of conscience” could be analogous to musical notes, middle C played on various instruments , or even the same instrument at different occasions, is the same note, yes? The production , or circumstances that bring the occasion or happening of the note can be anywhere or anywhen, but the location or duration of the note may be limited to circumstances of a defined where or when.

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1 hour ago, tadmjones said:

“..sameness of conscience” could be analogous to musical notes, middle C played on various instruments , or even the same instrument at different occasions, is the same note, yes? The production , or circumstances that bring the occasion or happening of the note can be anywhere or anywhen, but the location or duration of the note may be limited to circumstances of a defined where or when.

I’ll link you guys to the thread where all of this was discussed  in detail and where I solved all the issues that can be brought up later. Then the concepts of the physics are spread across several threads.  Won’t re-explain and re-argue everything here or go into the specific mathematics of the physics here. For full integration requires all of that and would require me to write several papers but the gist can be mostly integrated from what is here already.