Ah, ok. So you are saying that we cannot know whether or not the first premise is true because the brain does not have full knowledge of its own beliefs.
I would argue that this is irrelevant. We would only need to demonstrate one belief that is useful for fitness but that is factually untrue in order to prove the first premise. The belief that bad spirits cause disease is untrue but useful as it compels you to avoid dead bodies which actually may cause disease. We have now (in an admittedly loose sense of the word) proven the first premise.
Unless we assume 3 implies a Pascal's demon scenario where all attempts to identify any set of beliefs and evaluate their truth value or usefulness for fitness will only provide illusory insights I believe that 3 does not contradict 1.
I appreciate your response and I actually agree with most of it. Let me address your points in order.
>First, you seem to conflate being a billionaire with conspicuous spending or otherwise inefficient use of their capital. Once again this is a generalization and many billionaires don’t have these sports cars and estates that you describe.
Of course there might be some modest billionaires that lead relatively normal lives. Obviously my arguments do not apply to billionaires that sit idly in their wealth. I could try to make a different case for why that is an issue but I do not have major moral quarrels with that type of individual and have no interest in picking this fight. Though I assume you agree with me that this type of billionaire is a rare one.
>Secondly, you state “I just think the idea of many humans spending their lives in order to satisfy a single human is absurd”...
Excellent point and I can not stress enough how much I agree with you. To be clear, I am not arguing that the principle of the division of labor is bad. Obviously some people need to be software developers and other line cooks. But I am deeply bothered by the fact that I will average 40 hour weeks affording me a great deal more leisure than the person who assembled my laptop, farmed the bananas I eat and sewed the shirts I wear.
This does not mean that the solution is for me to live in the forest and sustain myself on berries. I recognize that this inequity is the result of different economies being in different stages of industrialization. My participation in the global economy will most likely help rather than hurt countries in earlier stages of development. I expect my global peers to join me in a relatively painless and happy life full of leisure as developing countries reach a more mature economic stage. If you tell me that this will never happen and this inequity is permanent, I might have to seriously re-examine my personal moral beliefs.
I have the same attitude towards billionaires. I recognize the historical trajectory that brought them here and for the cheap access to information and technology enabled by the industries that minted the latest set of tech billionaires I consider the deal to be quite good. I can still hold the belief that its morally wrong to have a billionaire class while not advocating for violently dismantling the current societal structure. I want society to become more equitable but I think the more realistic time-frame is in the span of hundreds of years, just as most social progress over the last millenia.
>You also state that “If the billionaire holds majority stakes within prominent industries we are delegating important decisions to opaque power with unknown agendas that we can not hope to influence in meaningful ways.”...
Good point. It can be argued we are better off due to undemocratic decision taken by key industry leaders. By democratizing every decision growth would likely be stifled. But there are middle-grounds. I for example would like some democratic influence over google without necessarily nationalizing it or forcing it into a co-op. Google is the de facto information aggregator for the half the worlds population that has internet access. This is a good thing and is due to decisions by democratically unchecked business leaders. However, its model for delivering information is highly incentivized to maximize ad revenue rather than providing the highest quality information. Philosophically, I believe that when something becomes ubiquitous to a large group of people, those people should have a say in that thing. I think a more democratic google is a moral necessity here which will likely be in detriment to the profit incentives of the shareholders. What this entails in practice is something we could probably argue about for a long time. (I understand that Pichai is not a founder nor a single majority holder of google and barely a billionaire. I choose google to highlight the drawbacks and advantages of democratic vs undemocratic power. Our discussion is about billionaires and not corporate decision making though I hope you can see how my reasoning would apply to undemocratic yet helpful decisions made by billionaires. )
Finally, I would like to state that my desired end goal is not complete 100% mathematically verified equality in all measures. I'm not a Pol Pot-esque collectivist who does not believe in the individual or individual differences. I actually believe a degree of inequity to be necessary for a dynamic society. A billionaire is a different beast than a multi-millionaire. I'm not advocating for a revolution to topple the billionaires. I'm advocating for a conversation about how extreme wealth might undermine the health of our society.
As someone who thinks it's morally wrong to have billionaires in a society let me try to make an argument why I think so.
If a person has a billion dollars it does not exist in a vacuum. It interacts heavily within the economy in which it exists and more importantly with the people who participate in that economy.
Think for example the amount of people employed to do work in order to service a billionaire. A vast estate requires 24 hour staff, a sports car fleet requires thousands upon thousands hours of labor to produce. The logistics of a private jet demands a lot of effort from a lot of people. In order to service a single individual we require, in aggregate, countless of human lives spent toiling.
I am not arguing that the effect of increased economic activity and employment are not desirable. And one can make a decent case that a billionaire's time is incredibly valuable which to an extent may justify spending larger resources in service to this lifestyle. I just think the idea of many humans spending their lives in order to satisfy a single human is absurd no matter which societal model organizes this arrangement.
It can be argued that the people who service the billionaire are better off having found employment within or in relation to someones billion dollar estate. Though I think it is even easier to argue that we can find many hypothetical arrangements that are far more just and moral for these people.
There is also an argument to be made about the large amounts of undemocratic power that a billion dollar in private wealth entails. If the billionaire holds majority stakes within prominent industries we are delegating important decisions to opaque power with unknown agendas that we can not hope to influence in meaningful ways. As I firmly believe that a moral society is actively democratic this feels deeply wrong.
With that said, I do not have any good quick fixes. Because the reasons I outlined I feel that the presence of billionaires reveal that human society has yet to reach its moral potential. I have no illusions that reaching that goal will be either a simple or fast process. I prefer billionaires to having a nobility class. Though I hope that we as a species recognize that deeply inequitable social arrangements is something we want to move away from.
Not sure I follow your logic. Watts is essentially using deductive reasoning:
1. The set of beliefs that are true are not equivalent to the set of beliefs that promote fitness
2. The brain is designed to promote fitness
3. The brain may hold beliefs that are not true
You are saying that Watts' statement is undermining itself, that the conclusion undermines either of the premises. But neither 1 or 2 is in contradiction to 3.
Now he takes the conclusion a bit further and argues that not only may we hold untrue beliefs but that with time we will hold a substantial number of untrue beliefs. He does not justify this in this quote but again, this statement is not contradicted by 3.
Or are you saying that since he argues that the brain lies to us then we can't trust our brains which in turn invalidates any reasoning demonstrated by a brain?
I would argue that this is irrelevant. We would only need to demonstrate one belief that is useful for fitness but that is factually untrue in order to prove the first premise. The belief that bad spirits cause disease is untrue but useful as it compels you to avoid dead bodies which actually may cause disease. We have now (in an admittedly loose sense of the word) proven the first premise.
Unless we assume 3 implies a Pascal's demon scenario where all attempts to identify any set of beliefs and evaluate their truth value or usefulness for fitness will only provide illusory insights I believe that 3 does not contradict 1.