Sam Harris on mind reading machines, free will, and deriving "ought" from "is"

Sam Harris speaks with Richard Dawkins at The Sheldonian Theatre, University of Oxford, on April 12th, 2011.

The full video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm2Jrr0tRXk

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Sam
• Harris
• Richard
• Dawkins
• Oxford
• Moral
• Landscape
• free
• will
• fMRI
• mind
• reading
• is
• ought
• hume
• descriptive
• normative
• evolution
• evolutionary
• psychology
• biology
• neuroscience
• philosophy
• atheist
• atheism
• technology

[writersblock26]

Thank you for posting this, MrPhiloscience.

[truthslap]

@OrganicKing you are perfectly aware that you are living in society, where jungle rules do not apply, and the way to keep this system intact is by practicing friendliness, charity, empathy, and other positive human values that allow us to live amicably with each other. If you did not "act like a human" in society, you'd be damaging the incubator in which we all grow. you'd ought to know not to do that because your own existence depends on others having not done that.

[OrganicKing]

@truthslap what is "acting like a human" and why ought I to do it?

[truthslap]

@OrganicKing if you can articulate a dilemma then you've already got the answer. you mentioned we have genes which are either active or dormant based on our environment, you are correct, we draw our morality from our environment. If you lived in the jungle, there would be no moral imperative for you to live like a human in society, you'd adapt to the law of the jungle. likewise when living in society your obligation is to act in ways conducive to amicable coexistence within society.

[OrganicKing]

@truthslap turned out that some genes might be turned on/off by the brain depending on the environment!

in this case, when is it objective to turn certain genes on/off and why?

how do we know it for sure?

Some people are inherently aggressive, why ought they to supress their "aggressive" genes and not the empathic ones? how do we draw the distinction?

[truthslap]

@OrganicKing you haven't demonstrated that at all, what you're doing is making an unfortunate over-correction for the problem of absolute moral certainty, which is no better or worse than your own position of absolute moral relativism. the fact that we cannot impose a single universal code of ethics does not in any way diminish the reality of morals and applied ethics within human relations.

[OrganicKing]

@truthslap just admit it!

Harris's points on morality are crapolla!

[truthslap]

@OrganicKing there's obviously a wide gulf between very basic empathy to a complex understanding of ethics, a chimp's empathy would extend only as far as its own family and in a very clearly darwinian fashion. a chimp's environment presents no evidence that raping a female chimp is morally wrong. it would however be unusual for a chimp to eat it's own babies, or for a silverback gorilla to attack it's own clan, because these would betray their natural ethics.

[OrganicKing]

@truthslap so if a chimp (they're empathic) rapes a female chimp, would that be immoral?

[truthslap]

@OrganicKing hyenas have no intellectual concept of empathy, their mental framework cannot conceive of the fact that zebras or any other living being suffer terrible fear and pain when they're hunted. would you punish a fire for burning, a mosquito for transmitting a deadly disease, or a tsunami for destroying a city? human beings, on the other hand, are perfectly cognizant of well-being of living creatures, and we therefore inherit the natural responsibility to protect it.