How come? Your sentence does not make any sense, are you trying to voice some kind of Borg philosophy?
Did you actually read it? I'm not sure you did. It was very simple. I'm saying that if the "informed by science" does not make your decision obvious, then you are no longer responding to the world in a
rational manner.
Now if you think that behaving in a rational manner is "Borg philosophy" then I'm pretty sure you've got bigger problems then simply trying to draw a non-existent distinction or two.
Here, I have an example for you. Imagine the following scenario. You know that jumping out the window will cause you to die (you are on the 100th floor). How does this information "determine" your choice of action? It doesn't.
It does. It means I'm not going to jump. It means you're not going to jump. It means that in crowd of several thousand people your odds of coming up with someone who knowing this will jump anyways are extremely slim. Because we don't want to die, because not wanting to die is what we are
biologically programmed to do.
Jumping out the window is not a rational act, not an act that a sane person will do except in the greatest of extremes, presented with a fate even more horrible than that. (And there are few. Otherwise non-suicidal people statistically jump only in the face of being burned to death.)
Now, if you ran into someone who
did decide to jump in that crowd, it is very likely you could
scientifically prove that there is something wrong with them. We call it
depression. It has symptoms, behavioral, physical. These are "naturalistic" explanations.
Prove me wrong, and then you may have actually managed to demonstrate something beyond shocking ignorance.
It only informs you of alternatives and consequences. You are the one to choose your course of action.
Why do you make a choice? This is province of science now. We can quantify why people would make choices. And if we can quantify why they make choices, we can influence them to make the choices we want. You can rant and rave and rail against it all you want, but this is cold hard fact. We have already discussed the reasons why one would, or would not, make the choice to jump out the window. We know how to
make someone jump out the window. Yes, that person ultimately makes the choice themselves, but that's pointless because we know what choices they
should make under certain sets of circumstances.
Now maybe you're sitting there in the lunatic gallery with the non-materialist neuroscientists. Maybe you're just clinging to that last hope that you are special. I don't know. I don't care. All I know is that you're shockingly wrong.
I didn't do such a thing. Go read about scientism which is a real phenomena, you are only showing historical and scientific philosophy ignorance.
Yes you did. You're doing it again. You're trying to cite history that shows you wrong (in that accusations of scientism are invariably proved hogwash by time) and bringing in philosophy which is of no relevance or value in discussion of whether, at this point in time, we have the tools to determine scientifically how a human being is supposed to behave.
Scientism is not Science.
No, it's snarl word of dubious value and even less meaning. You're the sort of person who would sit there in days of Galileo and demand to know how he is certain that his telescope shows what actually exists and that it is not deceiving him. You're dismissing out of hand entire fields of science such as psychology and sociology to dismiss the possibility that science can determine how humans ought to behave. It's patently ridiculous. That's what they
do.Science
can do this. Maybe not quite yet, though I doubt that. But it can. And you deny the existence of whole fields dedicated to the very purpose so you can maintain that it cannot. It's complete bull****.
Scientism is what happens when you got illiterate culturally yet brilliant scientists trying to poke where they shouldn't, over-confident due to their success at their own specific field.
As culture has nothing to do with science, and should never have anything to do with science, what does cultural illiteracy have to do with being wrong?
The worse offense is when scientists pretend they can "derive" ethics from basic physics, or at least imply such possibility.
No one has made such a claim. This is a blatant straw man.
While, theoretically and assymptotically, I do agree with it (I see nothing but "naturalness" in the world), such a project is doomed to start due to the sheer immensety of the chaotic unknown variables that we would have to solve.
So now you demand
absolute perfection from your moral system, something you have already stated your existing one does not and cannot provide, before you will back it. We can already predict human behavior with high degrees of confidence in many situations, and yet you claim this is not good enough somehow, that we must have perfection before we are able to devise morality.
Well in that case you'd better throw out every existing moral system because none of them meet that standard. Science is better-equipped to devise a moral system now than anyone else who has ever done so in the past, but you would deny them their shot at it because...?
To pretend that such derivations are "somewhat" knowledgeable is thus scientific inanity, hogwash, gibberish. It fails basic scientific criteria, such as falsification and verification.
You must know everything, or you know nothing. This is your stance, then? Here's a term you'll do well to learn: confidence level. You aren't talking like a scientist at all. You're talking like a priest.
You still do not understand the point. Science, if you want to define it in positivistic terms, is about the prediction of future observations. But you are confusing prediction with intentionality. One thing is to know that if I press a button a nuclear blast will destroy Moscow. A completely different one is if whether I should.
No. I'm saying we can predict whether you should because we know what the consequences will be. I'm saying we can predict whether you
would, too.
This "should" can be informed, but that's all. For instance, "If you want to avoid nuclear war, you shouldn't press the button." But this depends upon if you want to avoid nuclear war or not.
And who among us aside from Nuke wants nuclear war? We are back, again, to basic biological impulses: when should we kill, when should we die. We can quantify what it will require to make you take certain choices, but you insist that this doesn't prove we know what you will choose. It's madness.
I can't even parse this. Morality is already real, I watch its irrationalities and rationalizations every day. It's a "mish mash" of gigantic proportions... but I guess that's the consequence of having 7 billion people on earth...
Morality is "what should be" in your words, not "what is", and thus (falsely) not the province of science. But if you are saying that morality
is now, then I guess it
is the province of science after all, hmm?
So what? You fail to demonstrate that we should not do this based on such conclusion. So you may prove that this may kill someone. You fail to show how this is "bad", which is what you are intented to show in the first place, remember? You are just assuming the conclusion, that hurting is bad because it can create more suffering, which is bad. This is insufficient material.
Now you're simply being willfully ignorant. Science can determine a
normal. From that we can assign a "this performance is worse than normal" and a "this performance is better than normal" by simple means; does it do it faster or slower now? Can it do more or less? Is this more or less efficient?
And there you have it. What is. What should be. What should not be. Morality, in a nutshell.
I did not say such a thing, I really advise you to read what I wrote better. There is a difference between "providing explanations" for a certain phenomena (and we can include in this phenomena moral decisions), and providing morality itself from this knowledge.
No, there really isn't. If we can establish norms, if we can establish
performance, then we can establish a morality based on what gives us the best performance.
IOW, to know what made someone kill someone else does not and cannot tell us, per se, whether if such behavior is "bad" or "good". Do you understand? I feel that you are having deep problems in understanding this subtle difference. Read Hume on the subject, he was quite a remarkable philosopher.
Philosophy has no place in this discussion. This is about science, and you need to have evidence.
Get out.
