This is great, Eric. The evolutionary frame is, IMO, key. (I don't know about the electromagnetic field, but I have no good theory. Just not "quantum"! :-)
Have you read / written about Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens?
Thanks Matt! No I haven’t actually read any Damasio. But I have been talking with ChatGPT for about a year and it seems to “know” my positions quite well these days. It says that he and I are reasonably well aligned, and so it might do me some political good to talk that up. It says we both consider “feeling good/bad” foundational, though his version is more about homeostasis biology and mine is more brain based structured value physics. So maybe I go a bit deeper? Whatever. I do suspect that a science of value could only help your own cause though.
Here’s a link to what it told me, which might open for people in general, and specifically through the chrome browser. Or not. I’m pretty bad with tech stuff:
Thanks for the link! Since you bring up Singer let me provide some associated thoughts that I consider relevant to both my project and your animal welfare activism.
Singer is of course a standard moral philosopher. So his famous “since you’d destroy your shoes to save a kid in front of you, aren’t you morally deficient for not sending the equivalent money off to save far more kids?”, is fine with me. Moral speculation and activism go hand in hand. From my perspective standard philosophers can go on with that stuff forever if they like.
The “metascience” community that I predict however would go far deeper than simple judgment about who and what is “right/wrong”. Instead it’s about beginning from the beginning, or formal acknowledgement of what it is that constitutes the goodness to badness of existing? Doesn’t it make sense to figure this out before moving on to the finger pointing stuff? But at least since the rise of Christianity, philosophers have essentially ignored the topic of value in itself to go on with the rest. So fine, they can do that while my proposed community is meant to go deeper. And how might fields like psychology fare without a formally grasped value premise regarding what they study? The now reformed “social justice warrior” Michael Inzlicht just wrote a great post about how many of his colleagues today still effectively work as if their mission remains the same — they must p-hack their way to a better world. https://www.speakandregret.michaelinzlicht.com/p/my-p-hacking-felt-like-truth
I go deeper than Michael does however to the root cause of biases themselves, or that in the end we’re all self interested products of our circumstances. I provide he and his colleagues with a potential foundation from which to build their various fields. Thus they might become scientists first without putting their thumbs on the scales to let the effectiveness of their models do the talking rather than the presumed validity of their various causes.
What I like about you is that you also started as a standard social justice warrior, but given your dedication you were also able to see that status quo activism wasn’t serving what it was meant to anywhere near as much as it potentially might. You noticed a troubling trend where even staunch advocates would hit a wall and so go back into animal exploitation, as well as bitch out the cause itself! You noticed that your movement was giving normal people reason to adamantly oppose it. But speaking up to hopefully help build a more effective community from which to reduce animal suffering, also made you another enemy of the community! As you well know, the irony of this is the least of the horrors of our fucked up world! But fortunately grasping how things are should help our various interests. For that we need effective science!
I’d like to formally thank the people who engage with me, both here and elsewhere. You provide the true value which incites my passions! As I was just saying to Matt, ChatGPT has gotten to “know” me quite well. To potentially help improve this current post I decided to teach another memory enabled AI about my positions, and specifically by successively going through what I’ve written at this site, including our commentary. “Claude” has provided me with some reasonable criticisms and suggestions from which to improve my past writings. One of its observations is that I’ve often let the bizarre to distasteful implications of computational functionalism (specifically what I’ve called its “AI sci-fi trinity”), do emotional work for me that I’ve not actually earned. Well spotted! I’ll try to cut that shit out. Indeed, there are similarly bizarre to distasteful implications of certain things that I actually do believe. Perhaps its most biting criticism however was that I’ve been “mythologizing” myself. Ouch!
In any case it was very supportive of the people who have engaged with me, and particularly championed the positions of Tina, Matti, Mike, James, and Mark. Perhaps I’ll go back to make some of those post improvements at some point. But as for not mythologizing myself, that may be difficult to end given the enormous implications of various controversial things that I believe. Hopefully keeping this criticism in mind, however, will at least help me do better on that…
Rather than get deep into the weeds. I think there is a missing point early in your essay. How exactly will your argument lead to a better foundation for the function of science in general? I think you need to first, explain that purpose and, second, justify that purpose. You state early on “…a new community within the philosophy of science needs to be created which provides various communally accepted principles of metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology from which to better found the function of science in general.” Simple question: Why? Why is this needed? What is the problem? From what I can see science seems to be doing OK.
Right Matti, this is big stuff so it should be important to make sure I’m not missing anything important like a purpose for what I propose. And though I might only state that purpose implicitly, I also think I do so quite strongly. The last two sentences of my first paragraph reads “Because economists have developed a vast collection of successful models while behavioral sciences which lack a money proxy have not, might the still struggling fields make similar gains by formally adopting the same effective value premise that economists use? That specifically is my proposal.” Does this not convey the purpose of my project, which is to say, “to help science function better than it has in the past”?
Then on people claiming that science is functioning just fine as is, that is indeed something one might counter my position with. So on either side we’ll need to present conforming evidence. I’ve made the claim that behavioral sciences today are about like pre-atomic chemistry — highly speculative and disjointed. Except economics instead seems successful, or more like modern meteorology. This is presumably because it already effectively accepts the value premise which I propose become universal. Economics has no replication crisis that I know of, though the known crisis does seem to remain (as I was just saying to Matt Ball about “social justice warriors”): https://www.speakandregret.michaelinzlicht.com/p/my-p-hacking-felt-like-truth
You say that you may state your purpose “implicitly.” No argument here. Your purpose in this complex essay is (to me) quite foggy. But the basic point is why? Why any proposal for a new foundation (whatever that means) for science? You really need to demonstrate that science has some sort of a problem that needs to be addressed. I know of no such problem articulated by any philosopher of science. Can you cite any philosopher of science who thinks science lacks a proper foundation in order to do good science?
I guess that’s the problem right there Matti, or that I don’t know of any philosophers of science who say that science suffers because they have no dedicated community exclusively tasked with providing various communally accepted principles of metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology from which to found the function of science. So I’d like to discuss this with any who are willing. I consider the field quite deficient here. How can we expect scientists to effectively study a value driven form of creature, if the people in charge of the “value” concept, ignore it to instead busy themselves with a supposed rightness to wrongness of behavior? Thus it makes sense that these fields (excepting economics), remain about as primitive as pre-atomic chemistry. Thus it makes sense to me that social justice warriors are still trying to go on with business as usual even given the reproducibility crisis that they created. Given such failure, shall philosophers of science remain blameless? Not from me! But for those bold enough to potentially strive for something better, I also provide a potential solution.
Earlier today I tried to interest a philosopher in the concept. He calls himself a variety of utilitarian as well as a moral nihilist. So in some ways he’s quite like me.
This is great, Eric. The evolutionary frame is, IMO, key. (I don't know about the electromagnetic field, but I have no good theory. Just not "quantum"! :-)
Have you read / written about Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens?
Thanks Matt! No I haven’t actually read any Damasio. But I have been talking with ChatGPT for about a year and it seems to “know” my positions quite well these days. It says that he and I are reasonably well aligned, and so it might do me some political good to talk that up. It says we both consider “feeling good/bad” foundational, though his version is more about homeostasis biology and mine is more brain based structured value physics. So maybe I go a bit deeper? Whatever. I do suspect that a science of value could only help your own cause though.
Here’s a link to what it told me, which might open for people in general, and specifically through the chrome browser. Or not. I’m pretty bad with tech stuff:
https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a6a6df1ce248191a60da9517c3be508
The Feeling of What Happens is great. He’s also on Singer’s podcast, where they talk about the implications of Damasio’s theory re: AI.
https://boldreasoningwithpetersinger.substack.com/p/new-podcast-release-antonio-damasio
Thanks for the link! Since you bring up Singer let me provide some associated thoughts that I consider relevant to both my project and your animal welfare activism.
Singer is of course a standard moral philosopher. So his famous “since you’d destroy your shoes to save a kid in front of you, aren’t you morally deficient for not sending the equivalent money off to save far more kids?”, is fine with me. Moral speculation and activism go hand in hand. From my perspective standard philosophers can go on with that stuff forever if they like.
The “metascience” community that I predict however would go far deeper than simple judgment about who and what is “right/wrong”. Instead it’s about beginning from the beginning, or formal acknowledgement of what it is that constitutes the goodness to badness of existing? Doesn’t it make sense to figure this out before moving on to the finger pointing stuff? But at least since the rise of Christianity, philosophers have essentially ignored the topic of value in itself to go on with the rest. So fine, they can do that while my proposed community is meant to go deeper. And how might fields like psychology fare without a formally grasped value premise regarding what they study? The now reformed “social justice warrior” Michael Inzlicht just wrote a great post about how many of his colleagues today still effectively work as if their mission remains the same — they must p-hack their way to a better world. https://www.speakandregret.michaelinzlicht.com/p/my-p-hacking-felt-like-truth
I go deeper than Michael does however to the root cause of biases themselves, or that in the end we’re all self interested products of our circumstances. I provide he and his colleagues with a potential foundation from which to build their various fields. Thus they might become scientists first without putting their thumbs on the scales to let the effectiveness of their models do the talking rather than the presumed validity of their various causes.
What I like about you is that you also started as a standard social justice warrior, but given your dedication you were also able to see that status quo activism wasn’t serving what it was meant to anywhere near as much as it potentially might. You noticed a troubling trend where even staunch advocates would hit a wall and so go back into animal exploitation, as well as bitch out the cause itself! You noticed that your movement was giving normal people reason to adamantly oppose it. But speaking up to hopefully help build a more effective community from which to reduce animal suffering, also made you another enemy of the community! As you well know, the irony of this is the least of the horrors of our fucked up world! But fortunately grasping how things are should help our various interests. For that we need effective science!
I’d like to formally thank the people who engage with me, both here and elsewhere. You provide the true value which incites my passions! As I was just saying to Matt, ChatGPT has gotten to “know” me quite well. To potentially help improve this current post I decided to teach another memory enabled AI about my positions, and specifically by successively going through what I’ve written at this site, including our commentary. “Claude” has provided me with some reasonable criticisms and suggestions from which to improve my past writings. One of its observations is that I’ve often let the bizarre to distasteful implications of computational functionalism (specifically what I’ve called its “AI sci-fi trinity”), do emotional work for me that I’ve not actually earned. Well spotted! I’ll try to cut that shit out. Indeed, there are similarly bizarre to distasteful implications of certain things that I actually do believe. Perhaps its most biting criticism however was that I’ve been “mythologizing” myself. Ouch!
In any case it was very supportive of the people who have engaged with me, and particularly championed the positions of Tina, Matti, Mike, James, and Mark. Perhaps I’ll go back to make some of those post improvements at some point. But as for not mythologizing myself, that may be difficult to end given the enormous implications of various controversial things that I believe. Hopefully keeping this criticism in mind, however, will at least help me do better on that…
Rather than get deep into the weeds. I think there is a missing point early in your essay. How exactly will your argument lead to a better foundation for the function of science in general? I think you need to first, explain that purpose and, second, justify that purpose. You state early on “…a new community within the philosophy of science needs to be created which provides various communally accepted principles of metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology from which to better found the function of science in general.” Simple question: Why? Why is this needed? What is the problem? From what I can see science seems to be doing OK.
Right Matti, this is big stuff so it should be important to make sure I’m not missing anything important like a purpose for what I propose. And though I might only state that purpose implicitly, I also think I do so quite strongly. The last two sentences of my first paragraph reads “Because economists have developed a vast collection of successful models while behavioral sciences which lack a money proxy have not, might the still struggling fields make similar gains by formally adopting the same effective value premise that economists use? That specifically is my proposal.” Does this not convey the purpose of my project, which is to say, “to help science function better than it has in the past”?
Then on people claiming that science is functioning just fine as is, that is indeed something one might counter my position with. So on either side we’ll need to present conforming evidence. I’ve made the claim that behavioral sciences today are about like pre-atomic chemistry — highly speculative and disjointed. Except economics instead seems successful, or more like modern meteorology. This is presumably because it already effectively accepts the value premise which I propose become universal. Economics has no replication crisis that I know of, though the known crisis does seem to remain (as I was just saying to Matt Ball about “social justice warriors”): https://www.speakandregret.michaelinzlicht.com/p/my-p-hacking-felt-like-truth
You say that you may state your purpose “implicitly.” No argument here. Your purpose in this complex essay is (to me) quite foggy. But the basic point is why? Why any proposal for a new foundation (whatever that means) for science? You really need to demonstrate that science has some sort of a problem that needs to be addressed. I know of no such problem articulated by any philosopher of science. Can you cite any philosopher of science who thinks science lacks a proper foundation in order to do good science?
I guess that’s the problem right there Matti, or that I don’t know of any philosophers of science who say that science suffers because they have no dedicated community exclusively tasked with providing various communally accepted principles of metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology from which to found the function of science. So I’d like to discuss this with any who are willing. I consider the field quite deficient here. How can we expect scientists to effectively study a value driven form of creature, if the people in charge of the “value” concept, ignore it to instead busy themselves with a supposed rightness to wrongness of behavior? Thus it makes sense that these fields (excepting economics), remain about as primitive as pre-atomic chemistry. Thus it makes sense to me that social justice warriors are still trying to go on with business as usual even given the reproducibility crisis that they created. Given such failure, shall philosophers of science remain blameless? Not from me! But for those bold enough to potentially strive for something better, I also provide a potential solution.
Earlier today I tried to interest a philosopher in the concept. He calls himself a variety of utilitarian as well as a moral nihilist. So in some ways he’s quite like me.
https://substack.com/profile/7803118-walter-veit/note/c-305636460?r=5674xw&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web