I'm not sure there isn't a parallel between ethics and math. You say the aliens would come to the same conclusions in math if given the same axioms, well it's quite likely the same is true of ethics. The problem with the alien test is that philosophy is about thinking and reasoning correctly, so if aliens think and reason differently, they're going to reach different conclusions. You've acknowledged that math is much the same. There's a good deal of human-centricity to any domain that focuses on thinking and reasoning. But it's possible physics would be the same. The human mind has limits, such as the number of items it can hold in conscious awareness, depth of indirection, and so on. While Kant was wrong about various things, his observation that our experience of the world is pre-structured by things like spatial dimension seems correct. Try as we might we can't think in four or five dimensions. An alien species that could, or that could simultaneously contemplate hundreds of thousands of items would be able to conceive of things that we can't. In that case, we would be the alien species who doesn't agree with the science of that other species. Does our not being able to think the same scientific truths as them indicate those truths aren't objective? I think not. It seems the alien test is more a test of how similar or different an alien is than us, than any test of objectivity.

ETA: An even stranger possibility is that the aliens don't understand certain concepts necessary to physics. Various animals like crows are able to solve problems, indicating animal intelligence, but do they have reasoning like we do? An alien species could have no concept of cause and effect, with any 'reasoning' about such happening subconsciously. Would they understand our physics? It seems we're in a parallel situation with math and ethics in that for an alien species to be able to embrace our physics, they have to have a lot in common with us or else they'll fail the test. It's looking like the alien test is less about objectivity and more about similarity to humans.

Biological relativism is a descriptive theory of ethics with some observational support which states that all biological creatures ethical intuitions are shaped and informed primarily, perhaps exclusively, by the circumstances of their biology.

We would expect, if this is true, that the universal imperatives of any living creature would be represented in the ethics of every living creature. Killing otherwise ethical and healthy members of our own societies is sometimes seen to be justified. Killing ourselves. Finding this in any species, human or non human, would not be a surprise to us. We ould understand it in other species, even if we disagreed with it (insomuch as we do or may, someday).

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(February 25, 2022 at 11:49 am)Angrboda Wrote: I'm not sure there isn't a parallel between ethics and math.  You say the aliens would come to the same conclusions in math if given the same axioms, well it's quite likely the same is true of ethics.  The problem with the alien test is that philosophy is about thinking and reasoning correctly, so if aliens think and reason differently, they're going to reach different conclusions.  

Maybe, but touching on the eastern western philosophy thing from before - there we have an example of different ways to think which still reached many of the same conclusions and was recognizable as a similar (if not identical) enterprise by groups that used those different methods. Biological relativism has been suggested as an explanation for that, actually. We found different ways to express ideas we shared.

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-just to flesh that out more for you poly. A moral agent that eats will have food ethics. A moral agent that mates will have mating ethics. A moral agent that hunts will have hunting ethics. A moral agent that cultivates will have cultivation ethics. A moral agent that consumes any resource will have ethics pursuant to the organization of those resources, their distribution, possibly (or probably) their defense, etc. From relatively simple creatures that have the bare minimum of moral agency (whatever that is) to highly complex civilizations who cross the stars to ask us "hey, what the fuck is with the stuff on your body?" - if biological relativism is true, it's inconceivable that there would be no moral rosetta stone between any two such species.

We may not find it, we may even be compelled not to find it - functional or ideological xenophobia might be a part of the universal ethics of biological relativism as a product of kin selection, ofc.

(February 25, 2022 at 1:04 am)Belacqua Wrote:

(February 24, 2022 at 10:42 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: I've been meaning to read Dante. A close friend of mine, who is very intelligent and also not religious at all, is infatuated with The Divine Comedy. 

That's not to say I'll necessarily share her enthusiasm for the work. But if she likes it, it can't be horrible. I need to find a reputable translation. Hopefully in the public domain. But I'll bust out my wallet if the public domain translations suck.

John Ciardi's translation is very readable. He was a poet before he was a translator, so the language is nicely lyrical. It has a fair balance between poetic sound and meaning, and nothing unreasonable added or changed to fit the translator's language. Also the notes, while not voluminous, are solidly helpful. 

This is what we used in my undergrad days.


The Durling translation is quite good, too, with good notes that are maybe more up to date than Ciardi's. This is what I assigned when my group read it.




Singleton's dual-language editions with commentaries in separate volumes are the scholarly gold standard. Necessary for anything puzzling in less academic versions, or if you're going to write a paper. The language aims for strict literal accuracy, rather than beauty.




Harold Bloom, literature professor at Yale (and a Gnostic Jew) said "Take Dante for your textbook," and "Shakespeare and Dante divide the world between them. There is no third."

Doré's engraved illustrations are helpful in understanding what's going on, but are not artistically brilliant. 

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Multiple links to illegal site removed.

Botticelli had a crisis of faith in middle age and devoted most of the last half of his life to illustrating Dante, a project he didn't live long enough to finish. What he did accomplish is artistically wonderful, as well as accurate to the text in every way. There are books of the full set, but these are pricey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Com...Botticelli

William Blake made a set of illustrations as well, but these were intentionally changed and adjusted by Blake in order to "correct" Dante's theology.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categ...ine_Comedy

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(February 24, 2022 at 11:32 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote: can we not measure the usefulness of philosophical assumptions and foundations based on the real-world outcomes they produce?

I think we can. But I wouldn't want simply to assume that a thing is good if it's useful and bad if it's not. 

Unless we are willing to allow such statements as "it was useful because it made me happy to learn it." or "It was useful to me in understanding how much bigger the world is than I had previously known."

Just as there are paintings that are good simply because they're good to look at, and music that's good just because it's good to listen to, there may be ideas or arguments that are good simply because it's good to think them.

 I completely agree. I think it depends on how we think about utility. I find the beauty of music and poetry not only useful but necessary to my own well-being, as I’m sure many others do. And even a bad argument can be useful if we have allowed ourselves to learn why it’s bad. In fact, I have found that making bad arguments has been one of the most useful methods for my learning why it’s bad, and how not to make that particular mistake again, lol.

Great. Crows are better at math than me.


(It’s always a thought-provoking and educational joy following along with discussions amongst you big-brained beauties. Thank you. ❤️)

(February 25, 2022 at 11:49 am)Angrboda Wrote: I'm not sure there isn't a parallel between ethics and math.  You say the aliens would come to the same conclusions in math if given the same axioms, well it's quite likely the same is true of ethics.  The problem with the alien test is that philosophy is about thinking and reasoning correctly, so if aliens think and reason differently, they're going to reach different conclusions.  You've acknowledged that math is much the same.  There's a good deal of human-centricity to any domain that focuses on thinking and reasoning.  But it's possible physics would be the same.  The human mind has limits, such as the number of items it can hold in conscious awareness, depth of indirection, and so on.  While Kant was wrong about various things, his observation that our experience of the world is pre-structured by things like spatial dimension seems correct.  Try as we might we can't think in four or five dimensions.  An alien species that could, or that could simultaneously contemplate hundreds of thousands of items would be able to conceive of things that we can't.  In that case, we would be the alien species who doesn't agree with the science of that other species.  Does our not being able to think the same scientific truths as them indicate those truths aren't objective?  I think not.  It seems the alien test is more a test of how similar or different an alien is than us, than any test of objectivity.

ETA:  An even stranger possibility is that the aliens don't understand certain concepts necessary to physics.  Various animals like crows are able to solve problems, indicating animal intelligence, but do they have reasoning like we do?  An alien species could have no concept of cause and effect, with any 'reasoning' about such happening subconsciously.  Would they understand our physics?  It seems we're in a parallel situation with math and ethics in that for an alien species to be able to embrace our physics, they have to have a lot in common with us or else they'll fail the test.  It's looking like the alien test is less about objectivity and more about similarity to humans.

It depends what specific alien species are possible and lightly. An atmospheric electropathic hive mind fly might for example in a dominant global position for millions of years start to ponder mathematical or mathematical like reasoning, It also might ponder truth in a deeper way. The chances of how close their reasoning might be similar to ours relates to how common or particular our reasoning is relative to whats possible and lightly. We do explore further into whats possible which does help in making better guesses and sometimes finding better insights. From opening our minds to the wondering of how original actually is the human race opens our minds better to the possibilities and in time allows us to be familiar with more.
In Quantum computing research it does show some signs that the mind might quantum compute especially at least to a small degree when organising thought in neural activity. It does seem as if this wider activity of the mind focuses on a smaller sub set of conscious detail and consciousness seems to play a role trying to maintain optimal mental evolution.

(February 25, 2022 at 11:49 am)Angrboda Wrote: I'm not sure there isn't a parallel between ethics and math.  You say the aliens would come to the same conclusions in math if given the same axioms, well it's quite likely the same is true of ethics.  The problem with the alien test is that philosophy is about thinking and reasoning correctly, so if aliens think and reason differently, they're going to reach different conclusions.  You've acknowledged that math is much the same.  There's a good deal of human-centricity to any domain that focuses on thinking and reasoning.  But it's possible physics would be the same.  The human mind has limits, such as the number of items it can hold in conscious awareness, depth of indirection, and so on.  While Kant was wrong about various things, his observation that our experience of the world is pre-structured by things like spatial dimension seems correct.  Try as we might we can't think in four or five dimensions.  An alien species that could, or that could simultaneously contemplate hundreds of thousands of items would be able to conceive of things that we can't.  In that case, we would be the alien species who doesn't agree with the science of that other species.  Does our not being able to think the same scientific truths as them indicate those truths aren't objective?  I think not.  It seems the alien test is more a test of how similar or different an alien is than us, than any test of objectivity.

ETA:  An even stranger possibility is that the aliens don't understand certain concepts necessary to physics.  Various animals like crows are able to solve problems, indicating animal intelligence, but do they have reasoning like we do?  An alien species could have no concept of cause and effect, with any 'reasoning' about such happening subconsciously.  Would they understand our physics?  It seems we're in a parallel situation with math and ethics in that for an alien species to be able to embrace our physics, they have to have a lot in common with us or else they'll fail the test.  It's looking like the alien test is less about objectivity and more about similarity to humans.

I think there is such a thing as correct reasoning. It just doesn't go nearly as far as philosophers would like. Most of ethics and aesthetics, for example, is ultimately opinion, possibly based in our biology, but also based on our society, etc.

The problem is that 'correct reasoning' doesn't give you the fundamental assumptions from which you reason. And, ultimately, there are no 'clearly true' assumptions.

Because of that, the sensitivities that lead to ethics would likely be different if an alien has substantially different biology.

Yes, our biology channels our thought processes. In many cases, it takes a great deal of training to overcome, even partially, that biology. That is one reason math is hard for many people: logical thinking isn't natural for us.

I guess I see physics to be much more objective than ethics and would expect even very different aliens to agree on it while disagreeing with the ethics. Even if they cannot see the same part of the spectrum as we do, they would be able to acknowledge the physical aspects of electromagnetic waves. The same if they see many more colors than we do or see neutrinos. it is the same universe for us all. Ethics, however, is more based on what is pleasant or unpleasant and that, I would suspect, would be very different for even fairly close species.

BTW: it *is* possible to learn to visualize four dimensional figures. It takes practice and is imperfect, but it is possible. But, most people don't even have very good 3D visualization.

It might help to be sure that you're correct in your reasoning there, Poly, rather than referring to some small subset of some ethics, or even aesthetics. The point, at any rate, is not to get fundamental assumptions (those would be axioms - and we can play with any number of them, in any groupings), but conclusions about fundamentals.

The ethicist I offered as an example didn't start with any fundamental ethical assertions, or assertions about any proper ethics in describing what he calls the geometry of desert. Didn't end with any assertions of any particular or proper ethics either. He studied the relationships and correlations between ethical statements as they exist, out in the wild. He discovered that ideas about desert are quantifiable, predictable, testable, even repeatable. They're also falsifiable.

This would strongly suggest that whether or not we actually succeed - we're at least trying to be moral objectivists. Not biological or cultural relativists, or subjectivists. Does he think we get it right at least sometimes by that set of metrics that has every defining factor of a scientific hypothesis or idea...yeah. I think scientists get things right, at least sometimes, too.

Perhaps, if you wanted to see objective ethics, you'd have to read about objective ethics, rather than descriptive relativism? That's also the case in the sciences, right, you don't read something by a botanist if you want to learn about birds. You go to an ornithologist for that. It would certainly be ludicrous to say "these scientists don't know shit about birds" because a botanist kept telling you about plants, after you sought out a botanist to ask about birds. I mention this, because objectivism, moral realism, is the majority position in normative ethics.

(February 24, 2022 at 10:29 am)polymath257 Wrote: Chemistry,physics, geology, etc, are NOT products of philosophy. They are their own independent subjects. Saying they are all part of philosophy is like saying they are all part of physics.

Not quite. Physics is the base science but it wasn't necessarily studied first and the other subjects didn't necessarily grow out of it. If anything, biology was most likely studied first because it is most familiar to the lay human. Physics may be more fundamental but the other sciences didn't necessarily grow out of it as a subject of study.

Science grew out of philosophy. That's why they are products of philosophy. Before science was called science it was called 'natural philosophy'. Philosophy was here first.

(February 26, 2022 at 6:29 am)The L Wrote:

(February 24, 2022 at 10:29 am)polymath257 Wrote: Chemistry,physics, geology, etc, are NOT products of philosophy. They are their own independent subjects. Saying they are all part of philosophy is like saying they are all part of physics.

Not quite. Physics is the base science but it wasn't necessarily studied first and the other subjects didn't necessarily grow out of it. If anything, biology was most likely studied first because it is most familiar to the lay human. Physics may be more fundamental but the other sciences didn't necessarily grow out of it as a subject of study.

Science grew out of philosophy. That's why they are products of philosophy. Before science was called science it was called 'natural philosophy'. Philosophy was here first.

And chemistry grew out of alchemy. But then it matured into a science. Physics and biology became separate subjects when they matured into sciences.

People today doing physics or biology are not doing philosophy any more than chemists today are doing alchemy.

A poor analogy. Chemists may have abandoned alchemy, but they haven't abandoned logical principles. You noted yourself earlier in thread that scientists are doing philosophy, and perhaps doing it even better than philosophers of old.

I think you're on to something there. It seems to me that to be a good philosopher today, you might want to have a solid background in whatever science applies to your subject of focus - and that's been the direction that contemporary philosophy has gone. I don't know if you can do science absent some philosophy, and you may actually be able to do philosophy absent any science, but, if you could, you'd probably be doing it wrong - if for no other reason than a disparity in the production of sound (or potentially sound) premises.