date:20120903

Re: Good is that which enhances life

2012-09-03 Thread Bruno Marchal

On 02 Sep 2012, at 16:38, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:

It depends what standards for and quality of information you have on
something.

People shouldn't judge what they do not understand. Bruno you
understand what Krokodil entails, with solid information, so trying
it is nonsense. But I don't think most understand what Cannabis
entails because of misinformation. To most people what Krokodil
entails is the same as Cannabis.

I let a singer songwriter make the point lacking in this thread

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhKq9JvssB8

Paraphrasing old Nietsche:
Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be
asked not to hit it at all.

To which I would add:
They should be asked to leave, or at least get out of the way.

I think we agree, OK? (or I miss something?).

Prohibition is exactly what makes information impossible. If all drugs
were legal, Krokodil would never have appeared, and everybody would
know that cannabis is less toxic (if toxic at all) compared to crack,
meth, and krokodil (except it would not exist in that case).

If cannabis was not illegal, nobody would ever hide its many medicinal
qualities.

The deep point is that food and drug is not the business of any
collectivity. People should be judged on the harm they do, not on the
speculation that they might react in some way with some products.
Prohibition is dangerous as it kills democracy, notably.

Like the NDAA, fortunately suspended by the supreme court. It would
have made possible to detain without trial, for arbitrary time anyone
belonging to a fuzzy category of "suspects of threat", like if the
human rights were not universal: it makes no sense to delimitate a
class of people to whom the human rights and the constitutional right
don't apply. Prohibition and NDAA belongs to the family of tyrannic
technic to maintain anti-democratic powers.

Bruno

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Re: No Chinese Room Necessary

2012-09-03 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 02 Sep 2012, at 19:10, meekerdb wrote:


On 9/2/2012 5:45 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
That's all I mean morals; having values about your own actions so  
that you can recognize that sometimes you do stupid or bad things  
- by your own standards - but which are not unethical because they  
have little or no effect on other people.


OK. May be it is a difference between english and french, where, at  
least in my country, moral is just a common term for ethical.



Yes, it is in english too.


Thanks for telling me.



But I'm trying to change that. :-)


Hmm  You might read again what Humpty Dumpty say about the price  
of giving too much work to words :)









Maybe you can suggest a different word, but the morals/ethics  
distinction I suggest seems close to common usage.  And even if  
you want to keep the two words as coextensive, it's still useful  
when someone refers to "immoral" to think whether he means  
something he would regard as bad in himself (like enjoying some pot)


?
(I can understand but I have to replace pot by alcohol, for which  
statistics exists that it is bad in himself).




or he means it harms other people and should be discouraged by  
society.


I appreciate that you seem to think that the society can only  
discouraged behavior which harms the others.




And that's the main reason I think the distinction is useful.  When  
a politician says "X is immoral and we should pass a law against X."  
his audience thinks, "Yes. He's right. I would feel badly if I did X  
or my child did X."   Sometimes X is also bad for other people, i.e.  
unethical and society should discourage it. But other times it is  
just personally repugnant to the audience (like homosexuality or  
getting drunk) and the audience should think, "Well I think it's  
immoral - but it's not unethical. We don't need such a law."   By  
not making the distinction they allow the inference immoral- 
>unethical->illegal.


I certainly appreciate your intention. Not sure changing the words can  
help. We should just stick to "don't harm the others, and do as you  
want as long as no one complain", or something like that.


Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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Re: No Chinese Room Necessary

2012-09-03 Thread Bruno Marchal

On 02 Sep 2012, at 19:32, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Sunday, September 2, 2012 12:59:54 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:
On 9/2/2012 5:01 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Saturday, September 1, 2012 12:43:50 PM UTC-4, Alberto G.Corona
wrote:
Where is the revulsion, disgust, and blame - the stigma and
shaming...the deep and violent prejudices? Surely they are not
found in the banal evils of game theory.

In the book I referred, it is described the evolutionary role of
sentiments. Sentiments are the result of mostly unconscious
processing. See for example the cheating detection mechanism in
this book, which has been subject to an extensive set of test. and
there are many papers about cheater detection. cheater detection is
a module of logical reasoning specialized for situations where a
deal can be broken. It exist because cheater detection is critical
in some situations and it must necessary to react quickly. Its
effect is perceived by the conscious as anger of fear, depending on
the situation.

That's not the point. It doesn't matter how tightly the incidence
of sentiment or emotion is bound with evolutionary function, I
would expect that given the fact of emotion's existence. The
problem that needs to be answered is given a universe of nothing
but evolutionary functions, why would or how could anything like an
emotion arise?

When an amoeba detects a gradient of salinity and moves in the less
saline direction does it have a feeling?

I imagine that it does. Not much like a feeling we could relate to
as human beings, but there is an experience there and it has more
qualitative depth to it than when a steel needle interacts with a
gradient of salinity, but less depth than when an animal's tongue
encounters salinity.

I am kind of OK with this, but I tend to consider that amoeba have a
tongue; a one cell tongue which is itself. The amoeba has only one
cell, so that cell is simultaneously a muscle, a tongue, a neuron, a
liver, a digestive cells, even a sort of bone when the conditions are
bad and that the amoeba solidifies for a while. The amoebas lost
universality and freedom when they developed the collectivist quasi
communist pluricellular organisations, known as pluricellular
organism, somehow. They even lost their potential immortality except
for some gamete cells.
Obviously, pluricellularity has strong local advantages, and you can't
stop evolution which takes advantage of any improvement of the economy.
Note that the unicellular organism have not disappeared, they are as
much successful with respect to evolution than us, and they have still
some big advantage for possible future environmental changes. If all
mammals disappear, the bacteria and amoebas will not care at all. If
bacteria and amoebas disappear, we disappear immediately.

Bruno

Craig

Brent

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