These are also good for those "Swedish logs" where you drill a hole in the top and the side, and then cut grooves with a hand saw in the top and make a fire right on top.
> There's no objective anchors. Because we don't have objective truth. Every time we think we do and then 100 years later we're like wtf were we thinking.
I believe I'm saying the same thing, and summing it up in the word "evolutionary". I have no idea what you're talking about when you suggest that I'm perhaps "one of those people". I understand the context of the thread, just not your unnecessary insinuation.
> Formula IS a metaphor... I wrote "formula or fixed law" ... what do you think we're talking about, actual math algebra?
There is no "is" here. There "is" no formula or fixed law. Formula is metaphor only in the sense that all language is metaphor. I can use the word literally this context when I say that I literally did not say anything about a formula or fixed law, because I am literally saying there is no formula or fixed law when it comes to the context of morality. Even evolution is just a mental model.
> Using some formula or fixed law to compute what's good is a dead end.
Who said anything about a formula? It all seems conceptual and continually evolving to me. Morality evolves just like a species, and not by any formula other than "this still seems to work to keep us in the game"
> Unless it's helps allocate more resources to those more fit to help better survival, right?;)
Go read a book about the way people behave after a shipwreck and ask if anyone was "morally wrong" there.
> By your logic there's no reason to feel morally bad about it.
And yet we mostly do feel bad about it, and we seem to be the only species who does. So perhaps we have already discovered that lack of empathy for other species is species self-limiting, and built it into our own psyches.
It seems worth thinking about it in the context of the evolution. To kill other members of our species limits the survival of our species, so we can encode it as “bad” in our literature and learning. If you think of evil as “species limiting, in the long run” then maybe you have the closest thing to a moral absolute. Maybe over the millennia we’ve had close calls and learned valuable lessons about what kills us off and what keeps us alive, and the survivors have encoded them in their subconscious as a result. Prohibitions on incest come to mind.
The remaining moral arguments seem to be about all the new and exciting ways that we might destroy ourselves as a species.
Yes! and Shadowrun! I remember just binging William Gibson after that, until Johnny Mnemonic, Hackers (the movie), and Strange Days, came out. What a great decade.
I still have my faded paperback copy of this book, from 1986. I pulled it down off the shelf and got a jolt of nostalgia, thinking about reading it when I was kid and just being blown away by such a weird vision of the future. The cover was neat, the shades on were actually mirrored.