posted by dennisn on July 25th, 2023 at 11:04PM
> You're saying that JF thinks that DNA alone can replicate -- like, just put a single isolated DNA molecule on a petri dish and it'll copy itself? JF thinks that?
Yes/No ???? (You do this EVERY fucking time. I've lost count of all the questions that you've ignored.)
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posted by Lucifer on July 25th, 2023 at 5:37PM
You know you're losing the argument when you cite your PhD and say that game theory is "snake-oil".
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Dennis's Mistakes on Morality
posted by Lucifer on July 25th, 2023 at 5:36PM From: https://thewaywardaxolotl....came-amoral.html
> "Only creatures that have the mental capacity to conceive of abstract rules can be bound and protected by said rules - and only if they reciprocate." That is very arbitrary. By the same logic, a newborn infant or a person with severe dementia may not be protected by the Libertarian NAP if they lack the mentally ability to understand it. Most people would disagree and insist that those humans deserve the same legal protections as more mentally capable humans. > "Morality = universally preferable behavior" No, Morality is not "universally preferable behavior". You just made that up. Most people in Japan, the United States, and Europe view the assassination of Shinzo Abe to be a "morally bad" thing since they like Japan, but most people in China and Korea view his assassination to be a "morally good" thing because they hate Japan. If it was truly the case that it is "universally preferable" to condemn murder, then why are there hundreds of millions people who applaud the assassination and celebrate the assassin as a hero? > "Humans aren't fighting over the last bits of air, land, water, etc." That's literally what they've done all throughout modern history, with the main exception being the modern era. > "Our competitions are chosen / voluntary." No, they aren't. If competition was truly voluntary, then there would be no competition at all because everyone would avoid it. One of the most fundamental principles of geopolitics is that selfish players (countries in this case) will compete against each other for scarce resources. And there are no permanent friends, only temporary allies for as long as the right conditions for cooperation hold true. > "Having one more human born on this planet won't hurt any existing human." If it's exactly *one* human, then probably not. But it isn't. The world population is increasing by several tens of millions of humans every year. Only a fool would say that there's no way this continuing trend could ever go wrong on a planet with finite resources. Unlimited population growth is unsustainable, and that's what we're heading towards. > "The energies in our ecosystems aren't that scarce" Yes they are, and they always have been. And it will only become more apparent as the world population continues to grow. If that continues, all it will take is another major crisis or two to make the world's food/resource supplies trip up and unable to keep up. Then you'll catch a glimpse of how biological systems have *always* work. > "Being selfish is okay. You've been brainwashed to think it's wrong." If anybody thinks that being selfish is wrong, then that would be you. You think that it's "evil" to have children that you cannot feed, even if that turns out to be the most successful (and selfish) reproductive strategy. You also deem many so-called "immoral" behaviors to be "universally wrong", even though they're motivated by selfish desires, whereas I don't view them to be universally wrong nor universally right. > "Morality, defined as universal preferable behaviors, does exist." Since you keep using the descriptor "universally preferable", it seems that you care about what the greatest number of people would consider to be moral or immoral, right? If so, then you should pay your taxes instead of trying to evade it. The vast majority of people consider taxation to be preferable and morally right, and since it's impossible to reach a 100% consensus by everybody anyway, you should be in favor of taxation and paying your taxes too, if you want to be "moral" anyway (according to most people's brains and mirror neurons). > "Modern moral theory says you aren't obligated to help him." Modern Liberals disagree with you. Who's to say that your beliefs are more correct than theirs, besides yourself? > Other species are not subject to the same moral protections as us, since they can neither conceive nor reciprocate moral norms. If that's true, then human babies, severely retarded people, and the mentally disabled elderly do not have the same legal protections as everyone else, which contradicts most people's moral intuitions, at least in today's world anyway. Though I am indifferent since I understand that literally nothing is objectively immoral. > "but even so using more energy in the ecosystem doesn't necessarily harm other species." Yes it does. The Industrial Revolution was powered by fossil fuels, which fundamentally changed the Earth, caused tons of pollution, and lead to the sixth largest mass extinction event in the Earth's history. As another example, humans have had to breed literally billions of livestock animals inside slaughterhouses in order to generate enough meat to feed the planet, and yet it still isn't enough, in part because the human population won't stop growing. > Animals shouldn't breed if there isn't enough energy around to sustain themselves. Just like a mother is being cruel/evil if she has babies that she cannot feed. And yet animals will still breed anyway irregardless. If there's a famine and civilization collapses, the most reasonable thing to do from a biological/evolutionary/game-theoretic point-of-view is to take what you can and give nothing back. Because that is what will maximize your reproductive success. And all the organisms that follow that strategy will spread their genes to a greater extent, whereas the most altruistic ones who choose to have fewer offspring will have their kind die out. You don't seem to understand biology or evolutionary theory very well...
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