What would be the harm?

[The Grand Nudger]

The computer may not be able to apprehend value, but electricity still has a value to a computer as a necessity of it's operation.  Conditional/universal.  In the same way, it may be a that a person is incapable of apprehending value, but that won;t mean that the thing being considered doesn't have it.

Then I don't agree with your definition of the word "value."  Power is not necessary to a computer's operation, as a computer is operating perfectly fine just sitting there being a collection of metal and plastic particles.  It's only if an outside observer wants the computer to DO something that there's any value to the power.

Well, okay, but do you disagree with it for it for any reason that would be relevant to it's use in ethical theories or in any sense of it's objective signification?  That someone wants something doesn't actually actually make that value necessarily subjective in the sense that moral theorists are referring to anyway.  A person could want something because it is valuable. A meaningful subjectivist value as moral theorists are discussing it, is something that only has value -because- we want it.

In sum, you can disagree if you like, but, as with moral disagreement, that may not signify anything meaningful.  

And this is a non-trivial point.  All the things we're talking about have an underlying attribute about item cohesion.  We conceptualize a brain as a unified arrangement of materials which has a certain function, and conceive of the idea that disruptions to this function (say by blowing parts of it onto your ceiling) represent a harm.

But the materials in the brain are elemental, and contain no brain-ness to them.  There's no particular need for those elements not to be burned, fed to worms, or otherwise repurposed.  What's the harm in anything, if the Universe perfectly conserves energy?  The answer is in our experience of things: we prefer certain configurations of material to others-- brain material inside a head, processing food and saying "Yummy, daddy!"  

There's literally nothing which we say has value that didn't get that value FROM US, i.e. from our world view, and our feelings about things in our world.  Not a thing.

Indeed.  Whats the harm of anything?  Whats the anything of anything?  What's anything? Waffles, waffles waffles, toilet paper toilet paper toilet paper.

We've gone from worrying that harm is subjective...and failing that, just implying that there's no such thing as harm in any sense.  Another pickle. It's starting to seem like the driving argument behind any objection is "anything but objectivism, and if objectivism, fuck it, nothing!". One wonders if you would leverage the same objection to our hunter gatherer and his fire extinguisher (and it not, why not). I mean..he -could- just burn...right? There's no reason that he has to stay not-burnt. Maybe he doesn't want to do anything, or maybe we don't want him to do anything. What is burnt, anyway? Is there even such a thing as fire? If there isn't, what does it mean to "extinguish fire"? I mean, we could ask all of those questions until we're blue in the face...but in truth, do any of them remove a fire extinguishers value for extinguishing fires or is it just a way of delaying an acknowledgement? Repeat again with electricity and computers. Ultimately, we don't have to want to extinguish a fire for a fire extinguisher to have that value, or to want to do any computing for electricity to have that value. It sits there, as potential..regardless of whether we want it, or want to make use of it. The same might be true of moral value. What are it;s value making properties? Some property exclusively of our mind..well, no. The properties that make a fire extinguisher good at extinguishing firs are it;s own, and that;s what gives it value -as- a fire extinguisher..and that might explain why we want one whenever we see a fire we want to put out. In this, we're recognizing value, not creating it.

-on and on, ad infinitum. The buck has to stop somewhere, or we're not actually having a rational conversation with an eye to understand the propositions. How about you suggest that amenable place? The place where you would begin to justify any objective thing. Doesn;t have to be moral, just..something that you think is objective, and what you use to say that..and we'll work form there, to see if that sort of objectivity making x can proceed into a moral principle. Rather than working the other way round?

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There's literally nothing which we say has value that didn't get that value FROM US, i.e. from our world view, and our feelings about things in our world.  Not a thing.

This though, you have to stop with this reassertion. It's just not that cut and dry. We didn't give oxygen the value it has to us.  We inherited that from our biology.  If we could choose, we might choose not to be so dependent, lol....especially when we're drowning. Our oxygen dependence and thus oxygen's value to us is not a mind dependent fact, it's mind independent and anything that needs oxygen is in a similar state, mind or no mind. So...theres at least one thing. It's not actually going to be hard to find more things like it. The question of objective moral value is in finding other values that are like that sort of value. Then...when we've found those, to winnow down those values that fall to this or that fallacy.