Month: August 2014

The problem with Old Ones is that you can’t second-guess them.

Formula for creating a perfect immortal being

i. The being must either decay at an absolute rate of 0% or it must take energy from its environment, use that energy to replicate at a rate that will not exceed that environment’s capacity.

ii. The being must be highly adaptive and resistant to external threats, resolving them either by coercion, co-option, or mimicry.

iii. The being must be even more highly adaptive and resistant to internal threats, and the result of any engagement must be the victory of whichever internal components optimize its survival.

iv. If for any reason there is a critical failure in stages i – iii, the being must be able to enter a state of dormancy until it is ready to make another attempt at permanent, active existence.

Critiquing “Vulgar Morality”

Adam Gurri’s piece on rejecting what he calls “Telescopic morality” (also see here and here) has been on my mind a lot lately. I happened to come across this writing at a time when life was already forcing a near-mode orientation onto me (so on the outside view, this philosophy is rather self-serving). I will join in calling the philosophical/practical orientation under discussion “vulgar morality”.

What does it entail? In a nutshell: your ethical life would improve if you focussed your attention on local (i.e., close to you in time/space/relationship) & concrete questions, at the expense of global & abstract questions.

Examples:

  • Study basic personal finance before debating macroeconomics.
  • Join your condo board and change their pet policy before weighing in on geopolitics.
  • Help out a relative with their leaky toilet before trying to solve The Middle East.
  • Get out of the habit of snapping at your spouse before pontificating about optimal gender relations.
  • Make something someone is actually willing to pay you for, before saving the world for free.

Continue reading “Critiquing “Vulgar Morality””

Local and Global and the Terrible Telescope, Part 1

In the comment thread for my previous post, I remarked that

I don’t know of a good theory that bridges the chasm between individual justice (where I think free association is an important fundamental right) and global justice (universal behaviors like [modes of systemic oppression]). I don’t pretend to have one.

What I’d like to do in this series is try to convince you that you probably don’t have one either.

  • Local and Global • William Lane Craig is Terrible • Kant is Also Terrible
  • the Repugnant Conclusion is Neither • Telescoping Considered Harmful
  • You Are Not God, You’re Not Even President of the Galaxy
  •  The Can’tegorical Imperative • Further Reading

1. Local and Global

One hard lesson every student of advanced mathematics learns is that a construction that seems easy and obvious locally–for instance, in a small region of a space–can be very difficult, or outright impossible, to make meaningful globally–eg, over the whole space.

For example, think about the direction ‘North’.  Which way is north? Wherever you happen to be reading this, you probably know already; if you don’t, your phone can probably tell you. ‘North’ is an easy local concept–we can all check which way north lies. We can find ‘north’, no matter where we go. Right?

Wrong.

Continue reading “Local and Global and the Terrible Telescope, Part 1”