Curious Wonder web notes

Existence: Moral Realism~Social Construct Morality exists as a suite of several subconcepts that grade between prescriptions to evolved to fundamental. Moral Prescriptions - Prescriptions, like money, are social constructions that tend to matter because everyone treats them like they matter, and everyone treats them as such because they are useful. The prescription "people ought not steal" itself is not structured to have truth value, it is structured like a warning or advise, but instead has implications about human social life regarding consequences of behavior ( var b ), an aversion to harm/loss ( var c ), and an intuition to detect entropy ( var a ). These prescriptions are tools that result from mental  processes supported by moral instincts which are sourced from evolution. Evolved Morality -  Humans evolved as social creatures interested in survival and reproduction, which can be idealized as well-being and prosperity. This interest leads people to behave...

 We are almost ready to dissolve Wallace's paradox that a forager's mind is capable of calculus. The human mind, we see, is not equipped with an evolutionarily frivolous faculty for doing Western science, mathematics, chess, or other diversions. It is equipped with faculties to master the local environment and outwit its denizens. People form concepts that find the clumps in the correlational texture of the world. They have several ways of knowing, or intuitive theories, adapted to the major kinds of entities in human experience: objects, animate things, natural kinds, artifacts, minds, and the social bonds and forces we will explore in the next two chapters. They wield inferential tools like the elements of logic, arithmetic, and probability. What we now want to know is where these faculties came from and how they can be applied to modern intellectual challenges. Here is an idea, inspired by a discovery in linguistics. Ray Jackendoff points to sentences like the following:   ...

Rules: sets of instructions, that when followed, will guarantee a specific correct result. Often Idealized to facilitate understanding. Idealization: generalization and simplification of concepts into forms that are easier to understand, transmit, explain, remember. Abstractivity: an interpretation of reality that involves arranging information into concepts and idealizing on them.  We often hear that we cannot derive an ought from an is, this is Hume's Guillotine and it is the philosophical principle that we cannot derive prescriptions solely from factual descriptions. A description of the world is necessary because without them prescriptions would not have any content to target nor any context to be relevant. In addition to descriptions, a second missing piece is also needed to form prescriptions: information processing into idealized rules. However, information processing is something a bit more complex, some groundwork needs to be set first in our origins. Origins   ...

  This variable can be measured by quantifying 3 subvariables :    Uniqueness : How many others like it there are available and how many different or similar features the item has from others.   Replaceability :   How much effort, time, energy or resources are needed to (re) create.       Importance : How much use, in time and instances, the item had. The amount of increase/decrease in efficiency with or without it. The consequence of its absence.      Imagine the following two scenarios involving the loss of a pencil.   You're about to draw something as a hobby but notice you've lost your pencil, you have a pack of 10 pencils of this same type, so you just grab another one. The store where you bought them is also around the corner, so grabbing another pack is also a simple task.   You're about to take a test, which requires a no.2 pencil. You managed to buy the last no.2 pencil they had at the store, wh...

 Some areas of knowledge have their own inference rules that can either reinforce or work at cross-purposes with the rules of logic. A famous example comes from the psychologist Peter Wason. Wason was inspired by the philosopher Karl Popper's ideal of scientific reasoning: a hypothesis is accepted if attempts to falsify it fail. Wason wanted to see how ordinary people do at falsifying hypotheses. He told them that a set of cards had letters on one side and numbers on the other, and asked them to test the rule "If a card has a D on one side, it has a 3 on the other," a simple P-implies-Q statement. The subjects were shown four cards and were asked which ones they would have to turn over to see if the rule was true. Try it:                    Most people choose either the D card or the D card and the 3 card. The correct answer is D and 7. "P implies Q" is false only if P is true and Q is false. The 3 card is irrelevant; the rule ...

Follow up to  Reciprocal Altruism  Humans are, of course, a brainy species, and are zoologically unusual in how often they help unrelated individuals (Chapter 3). Our lifestyles and our minds are particularly adapted to the demands of reciprocal altruism. People have food, tools, help, and information to trade. With language, information is an ideal trade good because its cost to the giver—a few seconds of breath—is minuscule compared with the benefit to the recipient. Humans are obsessed with individuals; remember the Blick twins from Chapter 2, one of whom bit a police officer but neither of whom could be punished because each benefited from reasonable doubt that he and not his twin did the deed. And the human mind is equipped with goal-setting demons that regulate the doling out of favors; as with kin-directed altruism, reciprocal altruism is behaviorist short hand for a set of thoughts and emotions. Trivers and the biologist Richard Alexander have shown how the demands of ...

We often hear people ask to define certain words before diving into complicated topics, or people will say "by definition" as some defeater to an argument. In the former case, it seems this is done because certain words can mean different things in different contexts and it cannot always be guaranteed that everyone will have the same understanding of the word, so asking for a definition from someone is an effort in reaching consensus in parlance and making contexts clear so that people don't talk past eachother. In the latter case, the person seems to be implying that a consensus of a word has already been reached and that the definition of the word must set further grounds of the debate or discussion. When we provide a definition in case one, we often just go by the consensus given by a trusted authority, like wikipedia, or provide context if the authority has more than one available. However, imagine that someone has discovered something new and has to come up with a de...

 This variable can be measured by accounting for the types of game theories that can be possible in a given context, the consequences of the possible dicision makers, and the alignment of nash equilibriums with the stability of modules in variable A and the low cost of loss in variable C. The following are examples of game theories with some moral relevance. Conflict games . (cells to nations, any system that can make decisions) In contests of strategy, as opposed to contests of skill, strength or intellect; in contests where two or more players have partly conflicting and partly shared interests, the winning strategies tend to include a self handicapping to make threats and promises credible.  Read Schelling's "The Strategy of Conflict"  Tragedy of the Commons . (communities) Commons like public water fountains, restrooms, parks, are services provided by governments as a public reward. Their survival is dependent on the restraint of players and the perceived availa...

This variable can be measured by quantifying the stability of each module and the structure as a whole; the effectiveness of the mechanisms used to improve stability. Depending on whether you're a lumper or a splitter, there can be more or fewer modules in the hierarchy, and there need not be a single possible module at each level. The relevant moral hierarchy is as follows: Atoms=>Molecules=>Cells=>Organs=>Bodies=>Families=>Tribes=>Communities=>Cities=>Nations=>Civilizations. Complex systems are formed out of stable modules because only modules that can exist for sufficiently long enough times can they reliably be implemented into larger modules, as with the Watch Makers' analogy. At each modular step there are mechanisms that can stabilize or improve itself or other modules in the structure. These hierarchies exist out of necessity due to survivorship bias; we are focusing on structures that have these mechanisms because they wouldn't exist ...

1. What is being measured? What elements of beliefs, emotions, reasoning and decisions are essential for something to be moral? Without which, these relevant aspects would merely be pragmatic, convenient or efficient. What specific aspects turn something morally relevant? That is what will be measured.   Things become morally relevant when two concepts are introduced; the Well-being and Prosperity of conscious creatures.  Entertain the following examples below by Jonathan Haidt, which focuses on the 5 conservative spheres of morality: A: Stick a pin into your palm. B: Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don't know. (Harm.) A: Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error. B: Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.) A: Say something bad about your nation (which you don't believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation. B: Say something bad about...

 The biologist Robert Trivers developed a suggestion from George Williams on how another kind of altruism could evolve (where altruism, again, is defined as behavior that benefits another organism at a cost to the behaver). Dawkins explains it with a hypothetical example. Imagine a species of bird that suffers from a disease-carrying tick and must spend a good deal of time removing them with its beak. It can reach every part of its body but the top of its head. Every bird would benefit if some other bird groomed its head. If the birds in a group all responded to the sight of a head presented to them by grooming it, the group would prosper. But what would happen if a mutant presented its head for grooming but never groomed anyone else? These freeloaders would be parasite-free, and could use the time they saved not grooming others to look for food. With that advantage they would eventually dominate the population, even if it made the group more vulnerable to extinction. The psycholog...

...Herbert Simon's argument that modular design in computers and minds is a special case of modular, heirarchical design in all complex systems. Bodies contain tissues made of cells containing organelles; armed forces comprise armies which contain divisions broken into battalions and eventually platoons; books contain chapters divided into sections, subsections, paragraphs, and sentences; empires are assembled out of countries, provinces, and territories. These "nearly decomposable" systems are defined by rich interactions among the elements belonging to the same components and few interactions among elements belonging to different components. Complex systems are hierarchies of modules because only elements that hang together in modules can remain stable long enough to be assembled into larger and larger modules. Simon gives the analogy of two watchmakers, Hora and Tempus: The watches the men made consisted of about 1,000 parts each. Tempus had so constructed his that if ...

Ontology - study of existence. Ideal -  as pertaining to Plato's ideal forms.  Ideal forms, like perfect circles and triangles, are constructed by combining different patterns of information into simplified, perfected concepts. These concepts rely on features of infinity to define perfection, a normal straight line will reveal imperfections when zoomed in, but ideal types are defined as being perfectly straight regardless of how infinitely it is zoomed into. Ideal types are in league with mathematical constants in their self containment.  From this interpretation, it isn't far fetched to conclude that these patterns would still exist even if the laws of the universe were different, giving credence to the conclusion that "ideas are the highest type of reality or have the greatest claim to being considered real". However, this is only true of the constructed concepts, the same cannot be said for the actual objects that these concepts are conjured up to represent. Real t...

 Are the marvelous algorithms of animals mere "instincts" that we have lost or risen above? Humans are often said to have no instincts beyond the vegetative functions; we are said to reason and behave flexibly, freed from specialized machinery. The featherless biped surely understands astronomy in a sense that the feathered biped does not! True enough, but it is not because we have fewer instincts than other animals: it is because we have more- Our vaunted flexibility comes from scores of instincts assembled into programs and pitted in competitions. Darwin called human language, the epitome of flexible behavior, "an instinct to acquire an art" (giving me the title for The Language Instinct), and his follower William James pressed the point: Now, why do the various animals do what seem to us such strange things, in the presence of such outlandish stimuli? Why does the hen, for example, submit herself to the tedium of incubating such a fearfully uninteresting set of o...

"Free will is another enigma. How can my actions be a choice for which I am responsible if they are completely caused by my genes, my upbringing, and my brain state? Some events are determined, some are random; how can a choice be neither? When I hand my wallet to an armed man who threatens to kill me if I don't, is that a choice? What about if I shoot a child because an armed man threatens to kill me if I don't? If I choose to do something, I could have done otherwise—but what does that mean in a single universe unfolding in time according to laws, which I pass through only once? I am faced with a momentous decision, and an expert on human behavior with a ninety-nine percent success rate predicts that I will choose what at this point looks like the worse alternative. Should I continue to agonize, or should I save time and do what's inevitable?"  -Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, ch 8 pg 558 "Free will is an idealization of human b...