No, moral non-cognitivism is a flavor of moral anti-realism, not moral nihilism. — Bob Ross

I would have said this:

the view that moral statements cannot be true or false and are just an emotional expression — Down The Rabbit Hole

Is a flavour of this:

the view that there is no right or wrong answers to moral questions — Down The Rabbit Hole

Maybe the literature considers them separate.

The main two arguments I have came across in favor of moral nihilism is that 1. moral thinking differs between cultures and people, so it is a subjective practice, and 2. that there is nothing tangible to attach moral facts too, therefore they do not exist. The main Idea between these two ideas is that morality was created by intelligent life, therefore it is a subjective practice that doesn't have any basis. — Lexa

Our moral values are just the result of our emotional state, which is no reason to believe anything - especially when we have competing values with others such as consequentialism versus deontology.

they could opt for a different flavor of moral anti-realism than moral nihilism (such as non-cognitivism or subjectivism). — Bob Ross

Non-cognitivism is under the umbrella of moral nihilism? The former is the view that moral statements cannot be true or false and are just an emotional expression. The latter is the view that there is no right or wrong answers to moral questions.

What is the fundamental difference between information processed by a mechanical computer and a brain? How can there be a fundamental difference in what is happening if all we are is mechanistic? — Restitutor

I wouldn't have thought that there is much difference. A self-aware machine would have to have a feedback mechanism. Experts are looking to create this:

"The final step of AI development is to build systems that can form representations about themselves. Ultimately, we AI researchers will have to not only understand consciousness, but build machines that have it. This is, in a sense, an extension of the “theory of mind” possessed by Type III artificial intelligences. Consciousness is also called “self-awareness” for a reason. (“I want that item” is a very different statement from “I know I want that item.”) Conscious beings are aware of themselves, know about their internal states, and are able to predict feelings of others".

Not only would you expect better of your own elected representatives that have been voted in by you and your peers, this is the most realistic thing you have control over. It's hard enough to effect change in your own country through campaigning for the attention of your fellow citizens that would most share your values. It's almost, if not, a waste of time to try and change the values of people living on foreign lands. It makes sense that people are most critical of their fellow citizens and representatives they elect.

But outside the mind, what connects atom A to atom B but not to atom C?

If there is nothing outside the mind that preferentially connects atom A to any other particular atom, then objects as we know them don't exist outside the mind.

Outside our minds, atoms exist but not objects (treating the "atom" as a figure of speech for something that does physically exist) — RussellA

Mereological nihilism? I've been meaning to look into it if you could recommend any books or resources.

Actually I didn't want to raise a tricky ethical question in that thread, because it is in the Politics and Current Affairs section. — Leontiskos

Fair enough.

I think it could make a difference. We distinguish combatants from civilians, but then there are murky areas such as civilians who are proximate to the war, producing arms or some such. Thus insofar as someone is associated with the war, they are not a mere civilian. So if a compatriot hostage is more closely associated with the war/fighting than a neutral or opposed hostage, then a relevant difference could arise. What is at stake is probably a form of collectivism, and it may be contingent on whether the compatriot hostage is in general agreement with their possessor's tactics (i.e. if they think to themselves, "I am not opposed to using compatriots as human shields, but don't use me!"). — Leontiskos

From a utilitarian point of view, you could say the sympathiser is worth less on the basis that they hold more negative utility, and from a deontological point of view, you could say that the sympathiser is less deserving. There will be a minority of people that hold the belief that everyone is equal no matter what.

so it goes both ways, "the wars you don't fight," become an issue as well. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. It's complicated as you have to measure not only the likely consequence of each course of action (or lack thereof), but how certain you are of those consequences. Makes questions like the one posed in the OP and the Israel/Gaza question extremely difficult, if not impossible, to answer.

A related question with respect to the Israel-Palestine conflict is whether it is illicit to indirectly kill those whom the enemy has taken hostage as human shields; along with the secondary question of whether the fact that the human shield is the enemy's compatriot makes a difference. — Leontiskos

The second question is an interesting one - think the difference between it being a Palestinian hostage or an Israeli hostage. Would and should both hostages be treated equal?

Anyway, I'll try and stay on topic as there's another thread on Israel/Gaza.

The idea of bombing civilians with any kind of bomb would strike most sensitive people as immoral. — frank

What if bombing runs where civilians were going to be killed as a by-product, were necessary to win WW2? I don't see evidence that they were, but I think most people would still say they were justified.

I'm guessing the situation in Israel/Gaza is what you and @RogueAI were discussing, or the situation spurred you to this question? Another tough one. For me, I think you have to look at the consequences.

As long as we are all opposed to death and suffering, advocates of a course of action that causes it have to provide justification.

Is there justification for nuking? If so, is there justification for nuking twice? (Many say no to the second question) The answer would depend on whether the war would have ended without it or them, and if so how costly ending the war would be without using it or them.

As such, were (are) they successful? The USSR is kaput, but China is successful. The USSR was able to marshal its resources to turn back and defeat the Nazi invaders, no small accomplishment. — BC

The USSR's huge contribution to the war was one of things at the forefront of my mind, along with it beating the west to space.

The answer to why it failed looks quite complicated, but arguably it survived long enough for us to say it is an example of a non-capitalist country that is strong and powerful.

I don't count the USSR or PRC as communist or socialist, despite their names. Cuba gave it a go but did so in a particularly disadvantageous environment (enforced by the US). Venezuela? — BC

From the link provided by @Vera Mont it doesn't look like Venezuela was given a fair chance either.

The Scandinavian countries have elements of capitalism and socialism in a democratic political system. That might be as close as we get to socialism. — BC

That might be where we first see UBI. Even if a nation is not in favour of guaranteeing its citizens enough to stay alive, UBI may become the cheaper option as automation continues to accelerate.

Not so much, if you consider the amount of outside interference to make sure they failed. — Vera Mont

Yes, that's what complicates the question even more - all of the communist countries mentioned in my OP were being undermined by the western capitalist countries both overtly and covertly. I knew about Cuba, but reading your second link about Venezuela, it's almost unbelievable how cruel the west were.

As for the USSR, I have seen from interviews a lot of people in the poorer regions look back fondly on it.

What makes anyone think that there is a system that works? What even is the measure or criterion of 'working'? What constitutes failure? Are you and yours the measure of success? — unenlightened

While it's a matter of perspective, some examples are more explicit.

Considering the USSR ceased to exist, I think it is safe to say that it failed. The question is, did it fail because of its economic system.

Economic crises in countries such as Cuba and Venezuela hint to communism's failure, but these must be measured in degree and number against the crises experienced in countries with alternative systems (namely capitalism).

Even if The Chinese Communist Party is now only communist in name, The Chinese Communist Party proper survived for around 70 years, as did the USSR. Does this speak to communism being fiscally workable, or does their failures speak to it being fiscally unworkable?

So, maybe I do somehow continue to exist. — Art48

Given an infinite duration, if the same matter combines in the same pattern, maybe we keep being reborn.

However, I am also aware that moral relativism comes with it an objection that there can be no moral progress, and so that undermines any idea of making suggestion as core to this would be that there is no increased in 'goodness' by making the above changes - there is no room for progress.
Furthermore, my own arguments as to why we should be using moral relativism in this case (it increases autonomy, respect and dignity at the end of life) are all undermined by my previous argument that 'goodness' is not fixed and therefore the qualities that i am trying to promote are not inherently good. — AlexMcGram

I think it would depend on your position:

(1) There is no basis to say that anything is good or bad

OR

(2) Good and bad are relative to the individual

If the latter, ostensibly not just goodness itself, but the degree of goodness is relative. By providing more options, you are providing opportunity for the subjective goodness for that person to increase?

If there are no right and wrong answers to moral questions, how can we say god is wrong, bad, or evil? — Down The Rabbit Hole

Surely some will say whatever it is that God does, says, or commands is good and not evil, no? But the actions and outcomes say otherwise, at least from the human perspective.

The bigger question then is, "If a morality is alien to human sensibilities, what would make that justifiably moral?". — schopenhauer1

The outcomes are merely not to our taste. I don't see a basis for saying that they're wrong, bad, or evil.

There could also be a God who commands what is good and what is bad, which we are not privy to. Who are we to demand for God to give us answers. It's not like we can say it is wrong for God not to give us answers.

Our perspective is irrelevant either way.

Yes. However, if we were to stick with god for a minute- what does a world with evil and mediocre outcomes reveal for its inhabitants (at least on Earth)? Have you ever noticed oddities in timing? An empty park that has one person in it that you collide with nonetheless? Things like this? There are oddities of life whereby the coincidences are higher than would be expected... One could weave a tale of a god who likes chaos and thrives in it. — schopenhauer1

It does feel like the world is conspiring against me every now and again. But over the course of a lifetime extremely rare events are going to happen.

If the creator is all-knowing, their actions are hard to forgive. However, if the creators were just reckless, or even just naive, there is room for forgiveness.

If there are no right and wrong answers to moral questions, how can we say god is wrong, bad, or evil?

I can see the point hiding underneath the question though. Even if there is no cruel god bringing us into this world of suffering, humans brought us here. If you feel it cruel for a god to bring us into this world, to be consistent you would have to say it was cruel for humans to bring us into this world.

I would think a nomadic lifestyle is similar to travelling/backpacking. While I enjoyed the experience, I eventually missed the comforts and security of home, and it felt like a relief to come back.

Even the cogito could be wrong?

We could be il-logical and therefore mistaken that to think we must exist. Or we could be in some kind of illusion such as a simulation with fabricated rules of logic. The cogito is built upon the unprovable assumption that we are thinking logically and our rules of logic are correct.

How can you even prove that disembodied brains are possible? The only examples of brains that we have are as parts of bodies. I can't see how anyone could argue that they are more likely without first establishing that they are possible, and so far I don't think anyone has done that. — GRWelsh

Yes, that's a strong objection.

Disembodied brains can exist, but they don't last long. I think I read that upon decapitation consciousness lasts for up to 10 seconds, and brain death occurs within 3-6 minutes.

Say viable brains with false memories appear as a result of quantum fluctuations - they only need to last momentarily for you to be having the experience you are having now. As your memories could be false, you don't know that you existed before this moment.

How would you calculate density for a infinite number of things (e.g., Boltzmann brains) in an infinitely large space? — RogueAI

Good question. It may be that density has no meaning within infinity.

Are we not material? Or did our consciousness arise unnaturally? — Patterner

I think consciousness is most likely either a property of matter or arises from it. Some people believe there is a non-material substance (such as a soul) that combines with the material to make consciousness.

If Boltzmann Objects could exist, if the universe was infinitely old, we'd see billions of odd things floating around. So either they can't exist, or the universe is not infinitely old. — Patterner

Science suggests this bubble was started by a big bang about 14 billion years ago. Boltzmann Brains could have existed before our big bang, either in previous bubbles or from a quantum fluctuation. Or if there is a multiverse, there could be infinite Boltzmann Brains existing right now. We wouldn't see them from our bubble.

I grew up on TOS. I know a lot of people find it unwatchable because of the effects, but it and TNG are my favorites. Then Voyager. — Patterner

I'm not of that generation, but I can respect the nostalgia.

As your tastes are similar to mine, you must be a Stargate fan. SG1 if my favourite Sci-fi series.

How do you account for 'paradox' in your 'every possibility that can happen, will happen in time.'
If I state 'The only true existent regarding Boltzmann brains is that they have no true existent.'
Is that statement true given a very large or even infinite duration of time? — universeness

(Unless all of this suddenly appeared from literally nothing, was created by god/s, or is an illusion) we know that patterns are spat out from something, like a QRF, or infinite universe/s (whether cyclical or a multiverse). Provided it's possible for Boltzmann brains to form, in an objective sense, they will almost certainly exist.

The question is how likely are we to be a Boltzmann brain. The Sean Carroll objection, that other posters have picked up on, suggests we cannot sensibly measure. As by doing so would be from the assumption that we are not a Boltzmann brain with false memories. I think @noAxioms is suggesting that our theory of how patterns form is more important than the fact there has been an infinite duration. And @RogueAI is saying from the view that material cannot naturally give rise to consciousness, Boltzmann brains cannot exist in any event.

I enjoyed TNG the most, followed by Voyager I think. I was just getting into Discovery and Netflix took it off :sad: I won't spoil Picard Season 3 for you, but it gets a lot better. There's some nice surprises.

Blame @Patterner for setting me off. That said, better my thread than @Bartricks'.

Well, Shatner's a classic, but Patick Stewart is my favourite captain of all time.

Have you finished the new Star Trek: Picard? I've still got two episodes to go.

You'll have to fight @universeness for it.

You need to be careful about what exactly "equally likely to occur" means in this context. The way cosmologists might pose this question is: "Given an observer, is it more likely to be a regular observer (a human or a similarly evolved creature) or a freak observer like a Boltzmann Brain?" This is a tricky epistemological question involving concepts like reference class, self-location and self-selection. — SophistiCat

Intuitively though it seems that simply adding "more of the same" to the world (more space or more time or more observers) should not make a difference to a generic observation made by a particular observer at a particular place at a particular time, so the challenge to epistemologists is to explain just how this challenge is only a seeming one. (Bostrom purports to meet it with his Self-Sampling Assumption, which he also uses elsewhere to analyze puzzles like Boltzmann Brains.) — SophistiCat

Yes, I think our meaning of "equally likely to occur" is pivotal. A more agreeable meaning may be from The Principle of Indifference: "A rule for assigning epistemic probabilities. It assumes that if you have multiple plausible scenarios, you should assume each is equally likely till you have evidence otherwise".

If the idea that minds can emerge from mindless stuff is incoherent, this problem goes away. As does simulation theory. — RogueAI

I don't see how we will be able to prove what gives rise to consciousness.

You're not suggesting substance-dualism are you?

If the universe is eternal, then it follows that every possible event will occur an infinite number of times. — Wayfarer

This is the basis for my suggestion that Boltzmann brains and human-life are equally likely to occur. Despite the latter's pattern being more complex.

Other posters have cast doubt on this suggestion. It would be appreciated if @jgill put us straight.

This seems self-refuting: if we were disembodied brains with false memories there would seem to be no rational justification for believing that we could be such, since the hypothesis that we are more likely to be Boltzmann brains relies on accepted mathematical and physical understandings which are reliant on the assumption that our memories are accurate (enough). — Janus

Yes, I think this is the point raised by Sean Carroll. And it is the same kind of paradox that faces epistemological nihilism - if we can't know things, we can't know that we can't know things.

We can only be completely agnostic on the question of if we are a Boltzmann Brain?

Yes, the part about all outcomes being equally likely within infinity, is my challenge to the paradox.

It would be good to have your thoughts. I have been impressed with many of the regulars knowledge on infinities.

Countable infinities are equal, so the infinite set of worlds where we're Boltzmann brains is equal to the infinite set of worlds where we're not. It's a 50/50 chance, epistemically speaking. Given an infinitely large multiverse, of course. — RogueAI

That's what I was thinking! Thoughts @noAxioms?

Professor Chomsky, as a millennial I have increasingly lost hope in politics. The Conservative Party here in Britain win election after election, and we have seen the prolonged character assassination of a kind and honest opposition leader, leading to him losing the last two elections. His own party's establishment took part in this, and have retaken control and kicked him out of the parliamentary party - a party he has belonged to for about fifty years. Do things change for the better? Is there hope for the left in politics?

Thank you for your response.

I have now read through "If You Must Give Them a Gift, Then Give Them the Gift of Nonexistence".

I don't accept Benatar's Axiological Asymmetry; it feels intuitively obvious that a pinprick as one's only negative would be worth it for a life of happiness and pleasure. With respect to the article's Scales of Value in Human Lives, if we are talking an individual's net experience, I would place myself on the same scale as Matti, and would accept The Offer. However, if not the majority, I suspect a large minority of people have a net positive life.

The article's Explanations and Concluding Notes asks: What life quality would be too low for their potential child? How likely is it that it would happen? I feel even the mildest of bad lives are better not brought into being. The question I struggle with is, what probability makes it acceptable/unacceptable to procreate? 60% chance of a good life? 5% chance of a life of chronic suffering? I don't know the answer.

What he is proposing is different to negative utilitarianism, which is the minimisation of suffering, and is similar to the way we generally make ethical decisions, by weighing up competing instincts - save that he is prioritising "negative things"?

Aside from the usual problem that his principles are just the result of his subjective feelings, said principles are going to be disagreeable to practically everyone (your everyday person and NUs).

In the first case, is each person just to be charged 0.50 (because that's the amount of damage they caused) or some larger number (because they irreparably bankrupted the business)? Similarly, in the second case, is the person charged with $500,000 or some lesser amount? Please discuss... — jasonm

Depending on the country, the offender/s may not only be liable for repayment of the money taken, but for any additional damage their illegal action/s caused. In England, in certain circumstances, legal action can be taken for loss of opportunity - for example if the owner/s of the business had a plan to invest the money, they may be able to sue for the profits they are missing out on. Any criminal sentence is likely to take account of the total amount of damage done (within the sentencing limits courts are bound by).

In my view, there is not a correct answer as to what should be done. There is the question of why each of the one million people in the first scenario and the one person in the second scenario stole the money e.g. was it necessary to feed them and/or their family. There is another question of whether the business owner/s were deserving of the money e.g. were they producing something that harms people. Et cetera.

Today there is even now a popular 'hype' philosophy like "optimistic nihilism". But to me personally, it's just the same basically with hedonism, which basically it all sounds the same, eg: "just live in the present moment, enjoy life, since we only live once!". But again, is this all there is to life? existence? — niki wonoto

We create our own values and purpose.

This could be helping people as @universeness has said, or improving ourselves, such as by learning as much as possible.

I have actually lived as a nihilist (I won't go into details) — Andrew4Handel

As a moral nihilist (currently not permanently, hopefully) I think saying that Genocide or slavery is wrong is meaningless. It may be that as with tsunamis and the rest of nature extreme brutality and harm is just a feature of nature which is neither good nor bad It means moral values are personal preferences, sentiments, and emotions but that nothing "wrong" has ever happened and that we probably cannot justify prisons or punishments and telling people how they ought to behave. — Andrew4Handel

Agreed. With moral nihilism you can still have values, but with absolute nihilism nothing matters. That's a dangerous view.