Robert Fischer › Comments

"My work is a fork of his. I store data more efficiently than he does and have some additional functionality. He's Burt. So it's probably about even. :)" - Robert Fischer

"What makes you think the world will be filled with selfish assholes if you're acting selfishly? Note that—as I said before—you can be selfish and also be polite, charming, and charismatic. Just because you would ultimately screw someone if it came to your benefit doesn't mean you're an apparent asshole—in fact, you're pretty bad at maximizing your benefit from other people if you are an apparent asshole. I don't think that the morality you're laying out is inferior to one derived from believing in a supreme being. To say it's "human born", though, is nonsense and betrays a lack of self-reflection. You're a product of your culture and your surroundings—you even describe your morality in Christian terms: "the golden rule". So there's no primacy to your morality except that it's the one you happened to be born into. The fact that you cling to the Golden Rule is ultimately irrational, un-empirical, and generally all those things which atheists deride believers for being." - Robert Fischer

"I'm using "utilitarian" here simply to mean "most beneficial", and leaving it to context to specify who receives the benefits. This isn't big-U Utilitarianism, which I'm very well aware of. However, big-U Utilitarianism isn't a rationally defensible position for an atheist to take—what justifies an atheist to sacrifice themselves for someone else? The immediacy of the atheist's experience of themselves and their own life provides the justification for the kind of Enlightened Hedonism that Brian advocates, and which I actually advocate for atheists, too—I just follow Nietzsche to its rational conclusion, and note that this does mean that an atheist, given a sense of more benefit than harm to screwing you over, should go ahead and screw you over. And an atheist should also be a Loyal German. I distinguish morality as being a personal sense of right and wrong, and ethics as being a systematic approach to right and wrong. I don't necessarily add an additional layer of "individual" vs...." - Robert Fischer

"To answer more explicitly what was probably the underlying question -- namely, "What algorithm are *you* using to make moral decision?" -- let me say this: I'm not using one. I reject the whole project of having an algorithm to decide between right and wrong as fundamentally irrelevant and unnecessary for me. (The anti-nominalism is strong in this one: http://blog.enfranchisedmind.c... ) I have a sense of right and wrong which is ultimately arbitrary and innate. I have a community of people who encourage me to become what I identify (non-algorithmically) as better than as I am, and they are my Friends, my friends, and my family. I have the story of Jesus and Israel which provides a way for me to challenge myself and reflect on my own actions and decisions. In some cases (such as getting involved in Quaker House of Fayetteville), I feel compelled by my sense of right to perform actions and join into communion with a group. In some cases (such as when I was editing some writing for Hugh..." - Robert Fischer

"Sure. "*IF* there is a problem here...". The point is that in your system, *there is no problem.* There is no way that you can say the bankers or the soldiers or the Loyal German is bad. They're acting totally in alignment with your ethical system. You have left yourself no way to get outside of your ethical system to critique those decisions, so you have to affirm them. Your ethical systems backs the Loyal German, backs the bankers, and backs the soldiers who kill the innocent reporters. And I have a problem with that." - Robert Fischer

"I have never heard a Quaker say "We should not do X, because God will punish us", nor "We should do X, because God will reward us". There are a variety of systems for making moral decisions which aren't utilitarian cost-benefit analyses: that is, they aren't optimizing for the best case for someone's own well-being (even if you expand "well-being" to include some kind of post-mortal "well-being"-ness). You've got legalistic modes of morality, where you do X because That's What You Do, and there's no real analysis of benefits or costs beyond that point. You've got other-centric/group-centric cost-benefit analyses, where you do what's best for the group. You've got hierarchical modes of morality, where you do what someone above you tells you to do. And you've got wishy-washy affective modes of decision making, where you do what feels right at the time, without actually performing a utilitarian analysis to see if it is advantageous to your well-being. And, beyond all of this, there is..." - Robert Fischer

"Yes, you're not a sociopath. Few people are. That's the Original Sin in the Nietzschean worldview, and it's something to be sought to be overcome, at least insofar as it limits yuour ability to maximize your pleasure (As an aside, I've always been curious to see a comparison of Buddhism's detachment and the Nietzschean Will to Power individualism, and where -- if anywhere -- they differ. I'm assuming Buddhists would want to distance themselves from Nietzschean individualism, but I'm not sure how/where they can.) The fact that we pay to go see people hurt and killed speaks contrary to the idea that empathy is some kind of ubiquitous state, even in the most pure physical version you're laying out. The success of the UFC is an interesting case to consider." - Robert Fischer

"Do you have a basis for morality aside from your own experience? If not, where's the flaw in the logic? What I know about atheism came from being an atheist (of the LaVeyan Satanist flavor) and spending a lot of time figuring this stuff out." - Robert Fischer

"There are a number of assertions in your post that are just plain wrong, and they deserve a distinct thread, so here goes. The biggest problem is that your assumption that all human beings do this cost-benefit analysis is just plain wrong. The idea that we're just bad at heuristics is just wrong. Despite its popularity, the idea that we are energy-miserly optimizers and naive scientists has been empirically disproven. The book to read on this is White's "Psychological Metaphysics". He's got the actual experimental citations for you in there, along with some underlying philosophical work and a proposal for an alternative paradigm that is more coherent to evidence. More directly, you assert that religious people are engaged in this same project, yet I do not recall any conversation of morality among Quakers boiling down to this kind of cost-benefit analysis, which brings me to my second point... I do not participate in a religion of certainty. The kind of certainty you're asserting as..." - Robert Fischer

"There is a lot wrong with this post, but at the end of it, I'm not sure what you're actually disagreeing with me about. Yes, we agree that if the risk outweighs the benefits, then the utilitarian ethics say that you should not do it. On the other hand, there's plenty of bad stuff that you can get away with in your life -- and the utilitarian ethics say that you should. The exact case -- killing another (innocent) human being without consequence -- is, for instance, the case that happened with the death of the reporters dubbed "Collateral Murder". The military reviewed the case and gave it an A-OK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (Bradley Manning, meanwhile, has spent over 900 days in prison without trial.) For the gunner in the helicopter, the benefits of killing these reporters outweighed any penalty. Therefore, killing the reporters was ethical. Similarly, you get cases of shady salespeople (including evangelists/missionaries if you presume an atheist worldview), the bankers who..." - Robert Fischer

"The presumption in the core hypothetical is that the benefits outweigh the potential utility. You can assume that you would never interact with the victim ever again." - Robert Fischer

"It's not my view -- it's Nietzsche. Basically, the argument runs like this. Given that there is no extrinsic meaning, the only thing that matters is your own experience of reality, which we presume we want to enjoy. Your only fundamental goal in life is therefore maximizing your own pleasure and minimizing your own pain. Empathy, however, causes you to do things which are not advancing your own pleasure, as well as bringing pain on yourself that you otherwise would not experience. Therefore, empathy is counter to the fundamental goal in life. There's a more pop and vitriolic version of the argument buried in LaVey's "Satanic Bible"." - Robert Fischer

"We got into it a number of times back in the day. It came up at one point in a conversation about why Freemasonry (at least in the Grand Lodge that I joined) required you to believe in a higher power. Working backwards, the idea comes up big in the following posts and (more frequently) their comments: http://blog.enfranchisedmind.c... http://blog.enfranchisedmind.c... http://blog.enfranchisedmind.c... http://blog.enfranchisedmind.c... My basic stance -- which I hold to -- is that if you're an atheist, you should be a Nietzschean who views empathy as a weakness, if not an outright LaVeyan Satanist." - Robert Fischer

"I guess I misunderstood your post. I thought you were arguing that morality was inevitably tied up into groups, and using this case study to demonstrate that it is true. There exists morality which is not tied up with tribalism, which means that morality is not inevitably tied up into groups, despite your example. You do a disservice to any kind of philosophical or scientific inquiry of morality when you dismiss these people as somehow aberrant or super-human, since many people follow in their foot-steps in the day-to-day. ~~ Robert." - Robert Fischer

"It's curious—and perhaps unfortunate—that so much of our morality is shaped by the Holocaust and similar experiences, which are explicitly construed around modernist group lines, usually with direct nationalist, Marxist, or racist overtones. Yet moral exemplars in our past—Jesus, Gandhi, MLK—all explicitly rejected group identity as factoring into moral considerations. There was no "them", only "us", and "us" includes everyone. So, yes, much contemporary and knee-jerk decision-making is certainly built on social group identifications and concepts of exchange/indebtedness/interdependency. But that's hardly sufficient to prove that morality is necessarily entwined in tribalism, especially when we recognize moral exemplars who lived lives that were counter-evidence." - Robert Fischer

"They can record your encrypted traffic just fine...but it's random bytes for all practical purposes. SSL's problem is that its certificate-based trust system is broken: it's cryptography proper is just fine, and neither has Tor's encryption been broken. There are some issues that come out of traffic analysis, but those are substantially helped by running your node as a relay. Even better if you run as an exit node. The fact that China feels the need to block Tor suggests that at least they can't break it, which is pretty strong support. Looks like Wikipedia has a conversation on Tor's weaknesses, if you'd like to see a conversation on it instead of just your personal "willing to bet"-ness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..." - Robert Fischer

"They can record your encrypted traffic just fine...but it's random bytes for all practical purposes. SSL's problem is that its certificate-based trust system is broken: it's cryptography proper is just fine, and neither has Tor's encryption been broken. There are some issues that come out of traffic analysis, but those are substantially helped by running your node as a relay. Even better if you run as an exit node. The fact that China feels the need to block Tor suggests that at least they can't break it, which is pretty strong support. Looks like Wikipedia has a conversation on Tor's weaknesses, if you'd like to see a conversation on it instead of just your personal "willing to bet"-ness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..." - Robert Fischer

"They can record your encrypted traffic just fine...but it's random bytes for all practical purposes. SSL's problem is that its certificate-based trust system is broken: it's cryptography proper is just fine, and neither has Tor's encryption been broken. There are some issues that come out of traffic analysis, but those are substantially helped by running your node as a relay. Even better if you run as an exit node. The fact that China feels the need to block Tor suggests that at least they can't break it, which is pretty strong support. Looks like Wikipedia has a conversation on Tor's weaknesses, if you'd like to see a conversation on it instead of just your personal "willing to bet"-ness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..." - Robert Fischer

"They can record your encrypted traffic just fine...but it's random bytes for all practical purposes. SSL's problem is that its certificate-based trust system is broken: it's cryptography proper is just fine, and neither has Tor's encryption been broken. There are some issues that come out of traffic analysis, but those are substantially helped by running your node as a relay. Even better if you run as an exit node. The fact that China feels the need to block Tor suggests that at least they can't break it, which is pretty strong support. Looks like Wikipedia has a conversation on Tor's weaknesses, if you'd like to see a conversation on it instead of just your personal "willing to bet"-ness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..." - Robert Fischer

"You're a bit late to the game. See the original post to see how I came by that determination. See the comments for someone else who is arguing I have a scope problem. And no, I'm not asserting anything positive about what can or should form the foundation of lifestyle and morality." - Robert Fischer

"You're a bit late to the game. See the original post to see how I came by that determination. See the comments for someone else who is arguing I have a scope problem. And no, I'm not asserting anything positive about what can or should form the foundation of lifestyle and morality." - Robert Fischer

"You're a bit late to the game. See the original post to see how I came by that determination. See the comments for someone else who is arguing I have a scope problem. And no, I'm not asserting anything positive about what can or should form the foundation of lifestyle and morality." - Robert Fischer

"You're a bit late to the game. See the original post to see how I came by that determination. See the comments for someone else who is arguing I have a scope problem. And no, I'm not asserting anything positive about what can or should form the foundation of lifestyle and morality." - Robert Fischer

"That entirely depends on what you mean by "rational". I've certainly don't assert that the belief in a deity is going to be internally coherent: at least not the Christian stance. I'm deeply influenced by Kierkegaard in this respect." - Robert Fischer

"That entirely depends on what you mean by "rational". I've certainly don't assert that the belief in a deity is going to be internally coherent: at least not the Christian stance. I'm deeply influenced by Kierkegaard in this respect." - Robert Fischer

"That entirely depends on what you mean by "rational". I've certainly don't assert that the belief in a deity is going to be internally coherent: at least not the Christian stance. I'm deeply influenced by Kierkegaard in this respect." - Robert Fischer

"That entirely depends on what you mean by "rational". I've certainly don't assert that the belief in a deity is going to be internally coherent: at least not the Christian stance. I'm deeply influenced by Kierkegaard in this respect." - Robert Fischer

"I also used to think that this puritanical disdain for desire and pleasure was a relic of the past and an inappropriate exaggeration of contemporary Christianity. Then I moved from my liberal mainstream context in the upper midwest of the United States to an ecumenical context here in the south. Let me assure you, the disdain on pleasure is alive and well. If you've managed to dodge it, congratulations...and I'm a bit jealous. Also, I'd like to note that my post was not simply about sexual pleasure, but about desire more broadly. Within the rationalist-Thomist theology that drives most high church theology, desire (except for the desire of God) is suspect, if not distracting, from the quest for Holiness. This comes pretty directly through Augustine, as well, and I'll be addressing it more explicitly in a follow-up post.Even in theologically informed areas, however, issues of desire are all kinds of confused. Theologians (largely) now recognize the problem of denying desire, so they..." - Robert Fischer

"I know that it's bizarre, but the reality is that beliefs don't really impact behavior much — we're rationalizing hypocrites at our core. Our behavior is much more determined by our immediate momentary environment and state, our tribal associations, our epigenetics, and the classical conditioning that we've received through life. You're critiquing modernism for being a religiously-based idea, but you're also playing directly into modernism and the Protestant presumptions which fueled it. The idea that everything will fall into place if you just get your beliefs right is an *extremely* Protestant idea, and as bizarre as it seems from within the modernist mindset, it actually sounds like crazytalk to a lot of the rest of the world. It's also false to fact in a lot of important ways." - Robert Fischer

"I know that it's bizarre, but the reality is that beliefs don't really impact behavior much — we're rationalizing hypocrites at our core. Our behavior is much more determined by our immediate momentary environment and state, our tribal associations, our epigenetics, and the classical conditioning that we've received through life. You're critiquing modernism for being a religiously-based idea, but you're also playing directly into modernism and the Protestant presumptions which fueled it. The idea that everything will fall into place if you just get your beliefs right is an *extremely* Protestant idea, and as bizarre as it seems from within the modernist mindset, it actually sounds like crazytalk to a lot of the rest of the world. It's also false to fact in a lot of important ways." - Robert Fischer