I figured your objection to the term “cultural appropriation” is that people use it to refer to exploitative things as well as what I view as innocent things like a professional dancer who is white dancing to an anime song or something. That’s why I proposed a new term, to help differentiate these things.
You measure those feelings in real time so 1 year is the same for any organism.
Well, I said “integral” in the vague gesture that things can have a greater or lesser amount of experience in a given amount of time. I suppose we are looking at different x axes?
I don’t know how to estimate something’s experience rate, but my intuition is that every creature whose lifespan is at least one year and is visible to the naked eye has about within a factor of an order of magnitude or two the same experience rate. I think children have a greater experience rate than adults because everything is new to them; as a result, someone’s maximal moral value is biased toward the earlier end of their life, like their 20s or 30s.
I still don’t know why brains are different from a steel beam
This is all presupposing that consciousness exists at all. If not, then everything’s moral value is 0. If it does, then I feel confident that steel beams don’t have consciousness.
Why would you think this would be in some way representative? It’s just your friend network.
I think it’s representative of my friend network. Perhaps I misunderstood what you were asking. This was a response to “how many leftists do you know?”
No I have not read Sakai yet. This topic is not new to me, I just disagree with you. But very well, I am glad that we have reached the mutual agreement that it is not an appropriate word for non-indigenous people in general, which was my original point that you responded to:
Reading this reminded me about another unpopular opinion: I think “settler” and “colonizer” are poor terms for non-indigenous people broadly.
As I see it, it turns out we both agree. I misunderstood your initial response to that statement as one that was intending to be a counterargument. So, sorry – I really didn’t mean to straw man you; I legitimately misunderstood what your point was.
Is this mars thing meant to be an analogy or do you mean people literally think they will have a better life colonizing mars?
Like, all my friends are leftists. When we talk about politics, they sound like leftists, they say leftist things, and espouse leftist values. My friends are all leftists because my friends’ friends are leftists and I make friends with my friends’ friends.
Regarding “settler,” I think it’s a motte-and-bailey tactic you’re using. The motte – the easily defensible position – is that settler refers to people who are bigoted. The bailey – the hard to defend position, but which is easily equivocated for the motte – is that it refers to any non-indigenous person. The reason I see this equivocation is because in my mind, a settler does not stop being a settler simply because they turn into an ally for indigenous people. Settlerdom is a property of a person that depends only on their geographic location and ancestry, not their philosophy. Father Le Jeune is generally regarded as an ally to the linguistic preservation of indigenous languages in the pacific northwest, and he even helped develop a writing system for Chinuk Wawa – but was he not a settler?
I don’t deny that it’s a useful verbal weapon against bigots. I would merely like it to be well-understood that a verbal weapon is what it is intended to be.
I vote we move to a new term, “cultural plagiarism,” which more clearly relates to e.g. a white person stealing a black musician’s work (as opposed to covering it and giving credit and royalties, which should be fine!)
My intuition for a person’s overall moral value is something like the integral of their experiences so far multiplied by their expected future QALYs. This fits my intuition of why it’s okay to kill a zygote, and it’s also not morally abominable to, say, slightly shorten the lifespan of somebody (especially someone already on the brink of death), or to, erm, put someone out of their misery in some cases.
I’m not terribly moved by single-celled organisms that can “learn.” It’s not hard to find examples of simple things which most people wouldn’t consider “alive,” but “learn.” For instance, a block of metal can “learn” – it responds differently based on past stresses. Or “memory foam.” You could argue that a river “learns,” since it can find its way around obstacles and then double down on that path. Obviously, computers “learn.” Here, we mean “learn” to refer to responding differently based on what’s happened to it over time, rather than the subjective conscious feeling of gaining experience.
In theory it should have a strong monetary incentive for all but the wealthiest of cis/striaght/white/males. They just don’t realize that for some reason.
I don’t mean to say that neural activity ∝moral weight. I am merely asserting that something without neural activity at all (or similar construct) can’t be worth anything. This is why a rock has no moral value, and I don’t need to treat a rock nicely.
I am less confident – but still fairly confident – that consciousness, pain, and so on require at least a couple neurons – how many, I’m not sure – but creatures like tiny snails and worms probably aren’t worth consideration, or if they are then only very little. Shrimp are complex enough that I cannot say for sure that they aren’t equal in value to a human, but my intuition says they still don’t have fully-fledged sentience; I could be wrong though.
The strongest evidence that shrimp don’t have sentience is anthropic – if there are trillions of times more shrimp than humans, why am I a human and not a shrimp? Isn’t that astoundingly improbable? But anthropic arguments are questionable at best.
DM me. :)
Transgender people in many states are probably not happy about the DMV. (I’m Canadian and cis so I may not understand this much.)
I think it’s important to differentiate systemic racism from bigotry. There are some people who have a definition of “racism” that actually means “systemic racism,” and they make a more compelling case that “racism against white people” doesn’t exist.
I’m of the opinion that systemic racism against white people is pretty rare, but you can find it in niche communities, not as much society as a whole. I also think of systemic racism as being about inequity rather than inequality; but if you were to consider it as being about inequality instead of inequity, then you could make a case that e.g. affirmative action is systemic racism against white people.
A lot of this is semantics, which is a distraction from real problem solving.
Very well, I’ll look at it.
It’s not necessarily true. I mean you could be framed with your DNA. I’m not arguing that it’s plausible, just not absolutely undeniable. For instance, I would bet dollars to donuts that somebody has tried to frame someone else using their DNA.
I have met one person (in real life) who uses she/he pronouns. I asked if I can call her they and she said no. I don’t know what to make of this, personally, as I’m unable to understand it, but I do try to abide by her request. I suspect she is an outlier though.
I don’t think that’s quite right. It’s more like referring to him by another title such as “a friend of mine” or “a guy I met at the mall yesterday” etc.
It makes me uncomfortable to state my personal pronouns. Years of growing up as a woman on the internet makes me not want to reveal my gender, even when it’s obvious (like in person).
I do find topics like natalism and deathism quite fascinating. I’m not certain you’re correct, but I do think what you’re saying is very plausible. I lean more utilitarian, so I find it hard to justify the notion of debt to a specific entity – after all, if you can do right by the entity you create, shouldn’t it be equally good to do right by another entity?
Oh yeah sure. More solved questions than unsolved seems like a good way to put it. But there are still points of dissent though.
The reason that I stand by the moral hierarchy despite the possibility that it doesn’t exist at all is that I can only reason about morality under the assumption that consciousness exists. I don’t know how to cause pain to a non-conscious being. To give an analogy: suppose you find out that next year there’s a 50% chance that the earth will be obliterated by some cosmic event – is this a reason to stop caring about global warming? No, because in the event that the earth is spared, we still need to solve global warming.
It is nebulous, but everything is nebulous at first until we learn more. I’m just trying to separate things that seem like pretty safe bets from things I’m less sure about. Steel beams not having consciousness seems like a safe bet. If it turns out that consciousness exists and works really really weirdly and steel beams do have consciousness, there’s still no particularly good reason to believe that anything I could do to a steel beam matters to it, seeing as it lacks pain receptors.