 Without any further ado, you guys are live and you're hot. Have a good time, gentlemen. All right, cool. So in what I think about objective morality, the topic, I guess, objective morality, I think that we see a pattern in moral progress, that the changes in morality across time and culture seems to be the same as time goes on. As we gain in the amount of resources we have and the amount of intellectual acuity we have, that there is a specific pattern that occurs across cultures. And I think that we're going to see the same pattern across different species once they get to the same intellectual level. And if we ever discover aliens, we'll see the same pattern in them. And once we get AIs, we'll see the same pattern in them. And if we do see this consistent pattern across different intellectual species of life, then that's good reason to believe that there's this pattern is caused by something greater than just evolution, especially if we see it in the AIs, which aren't evolutionary. And if we see it in other planets and other species, that's a good indication that it's more than just human society. And if it's greater than human society and evolution, then I think it's a good indicator that it's probably something more, even though we don't know what that something is yet. I guess broadly speaking, my biggest issue when you talk about any kind of objective moral, am I talking to them or am I talking to you? Me. Because I can talk quietly like this, or I can project my voice to the whole hall like this. Project, we don't have any speakers. So typically when I talk about morality or objective morality, usually my big problem comes when we try to establish any kind of moral fact. The problem is that we can observe a set of behaviors or phenomenon, and some people like to say, well look, that's morality. But if I take a certain behavior, and I get two people to watch it, and they have a disagreement on the morality, there is absolutely no way for them to resolve that dispute without trying to reference some external text or something else. Whereas if we try to resolve any other type of qualia or sensory experience, like is the dog soft or not? Is this the color red or blue? We have either sensory organs or we can employ some faculty to figure out if there is some underlying fact of the matter here. It's tempting when we see patterns to say that because this pattern exists, there's some guiding hand behind the pattern. I think that as humans, one of our greatest evolutionary advantages is our ability to recognize patterns and then utilize these, whether it's they're making tools or surviving the wilderness or whatever. But just because a pattern has been seen doesn't mean that there's a guiding hand behind this pattern. This is one of the most common arguments used frequently by theistic people to cite the existence of a higher power, for instance. Well, if there's a pattern, it must be some divine revelation. Like if you see a puddle of water, you assume that the water is a certain shape because it is and not just because that's the shape of the pothole. I think that you can see patterns of development across human history, but that could just be our ability to satisfy our basic desires has gotten better as technology has increased. I don't think that it necessarily points to some sort of objective moral guiding hand. I still don't see any evidence of that versus just a group of species that are developing a way that can satisfy their preferences better. If we did see in other planets and other things that didn't evolve through evolution, do you think that would increase the amount of evidence for it being something more than just a societal development? Not necessarily, I don't think so. As long as there are other plausible explanations that can be observed, it's hard to jump and say there must be an unobservable, untastable, unempirical guiding hand behind all of it. All right, I wouldn't say that. I would say that it will be empirical. I think mine does make testable predictions in the goal that it will be a force of nature like gravity or it is literally a field that we can measure. So I wouldn't say it's unempirical, but saying that there are other things that could potentially explain it don't seem to be a counter evidence to the fact that it could be caused by this. Like if you make a novel prediction that whatever will send a spaceship around at this distance to go to the moon or whatever, that could also be explained by the fact that we're in the matrix, but it doesn't detract from the fact that it's evidence that the world is round and we actually go to space. So the fact that it could be explained by other hypotheses wouldn't be a deterrent from it being positive evidence for a hypothesis that was able to make predictions that others weren't. No, I think that that's absolutely true, but we could surmise a million hypotheses about literally everything. Something that you said specifically is that it will be measurable how. So when we bring up gravity as an example, I can establish a system where there are no moral agents, there's no thinking conscious creatures, but I can still measure the effects of gravity that matter will have on other matter. How can I measure the morality of a system rather than just asking like subjectively what an individual feels about what they're seeing in front of them? I would say the same way as you do gravity. I'd say it's literally a field like gravity. It's just we just can't measure it yet. We don't have the right tools, we don't have the right developed ability to yet, but I think we will in the future. So I'd say we can literally measure it as a field exactly as we do in any of the other fields of physics. Okay, that could be possible, but then you, so if the argument is essentially there exists this thing, but we have no way to measure it, but hopefully in the future we'll develop tools to measure it. There's no, so it doesn't exist in this reality yet. It's either extra reality or immaterial, or it's part of this reality, but we can't even measure it yet. I don't know how, I don't have no idea how I'm supposed to grapple with that idea. There's like nothing for me to grab onto there. Well if it was this field, presumably, and that would explain why it would affect every different species across the universe essentially. And so if there was this pattern that was universal across species, that is not something we would expect if it was purely societal or purely evolutionary because those would have a greater expected diversity. And so if you can plot out this very specific line going in this very specific direction that all of the different species are experiencing more progress in the same way that seems to, it would be more indicative of this unknown force affecting all of the different species rather than just happening by chance for them to come about to this conclusion through evolutionary means. So I think usually a hypothesis for an unknown force will arise when we encounter measurements in a system that we can't explain. So my understanding is as of right now, we have no idea what dark matter is or what it might be made out of or any of the properties of dark matter, but dark matter is hypothesized to exist because we can't explain why gravities aren't like flying apart at hyperspeeds. When it comes to the morality thing, I don't see there being any parts of behavior on the planet where it's like, here's a phenomenon, we've observed it, but we have no explanation for this. We need to bring in some supernatural or some immaterial force to explain why the things are happening the way they are. I totally agree, I think that if we had proof or if a necessity to add in something extra, there'd be far greater evidence for it. That's why I said in the future, I think, if we discover this pattern to hold through other species when they evolve and through other aliens when we discover them and if AI's discover these, which I believe will happen, that would be stronger evidence for this to be the case rather than just what we have now. Obviously, if we had an empirical way to demonstrate it now, I'd have a Nobel Prize, but this, in my hypothesis, this is something we're going to discover in the future and if that happened, would that be sufficient evidence for you to be more inclined to believe this? Yeah, but I mean, what we're starting at right now, so we have zero empirical measurements. We don't have the tools to measure it. We don't have any strong evidence, period. We don't have a necessity to use morality to explain anything. All we've observed are some patterns that can be explained through other processes that maybe one day will be subsumed by morality, but we just have nothing for that yet. Yeah, but this is the same how everything in science starts. We see a phenomenon like, oh, that looks like we could explain this by Zeus or whatever, whatever we think of at the time and then someone makes a prediction that, oh, in the future, here's something else we'll discover if my hypothesis is right and that's how all science progresses. So yes, I agree, we don't have any strong evidence, never claimed we did, but I do think here is a good way that I expect and seems reasonable to expect to the future that we will see this. Sure, so people use the like, everything in science starts this way, but for every one truly scientific theory or theory that ends up being validated, there are a million that are completely and totally bunk. So, I mean, it might be in the future if we have some way to measure this or some way to gather empirical data on it, it might be true, but it only exists as literally just a hypothesis right now. There's no way to test it or do anything else about it, I guess. Yeah, for sure. So it is just a hypothesis at this point, but I do, the reason I'm presenting this as making these testable predictions, that's a way to differentiate it from other, all those other infinitely many hypotheses, I'm claiming if I'm right, here's things we would expect to see in the future. And these are very unexpected predictions given current sociological basis of evolution of based morality. Yeah, but don't you feel like the problem with the, the problem is there are no testable predictions here and it feels like if there, if something were to regress in some way, it feels like you'd have another explanation for it. So for instance, if we look at a woman's right having abortion in the United States, that's something that has gone one way and is now being challenged and has potentially moving the other way in the United States, as that is, does that go counter then to your system? Does that, if you have like a, a Bayesian probability of it happening, are you now aiming that downwards? Maybe there's less a chance that they're being an objective morality or? So I would say that there's a pattern of a whole bunch of different things and anything going in the opposite direction would be evidence against the hypothesis. And so if there was enough counter examples to the contrary, then yes, that would be defeaters for the model. Okay. Well, I don't really have anything empirical or anything to grapple with. I mean, it's an interesting thought experiment, but it just, it only exists in hypothesis of the moment with no way to test it or no way to, so I don't, yeah. Do we do Q and A or what? Well, yeah, so there's a few more questions though. So if we did find other species that followed the exact same patterns throughout their entire evolutionary histories on other planets, including AIs that didn't devolve, why would you not consider that strong evidence of this case, even without any empirical proof of this field? It seems to be the case that things, at least the way that it works genetically on our planet, genes wanna propagate, and so they will develop systems that ensure their survival so that they can propagate, basically, or reproduce, I guess is what we're saying. If that is the case, then I would expect that as these systems become more complicated and more complex over time, they're gonna develop more sophisticated ways of ensuring their propagation. And I don't think that you need any kind of like extra moral fact or extra immaterial thing to explain that guiding hand. It'd be like saying that markets are guided by God because Adam Smith talks about the invisible hand of the market ensuring competition lowers prices for people. I don't think, just because you'll get these kind of, these emergent properties from systems doesn't necessarily mean there has to be like a guiding immaterial thing moving those systems in a direction. Right, I'd agree, but I'd say that if this same pattern exists in things that are not biological, like silicone-based life or computer's AIs that are designed and they come upon the same kind of conclusion, that would indicate that it must be more than just evolutionary in that sense, right? Or evolution could work the same way across the entire galaxy now, or universe. Well, I mean, things that literally didn't evolve, AIs, no evolution. Things that literally didn't evolve. It's hard to imagine something that doesn't evolve from something else, but I mean, I guess it's possible, yeah. Much the same that if I were to discover on another planet a million light years away, that they worshiped a being that died and came back three days later called Jesus Christ, I'd be like, okay, well, holy shit, maybe the Jesus thing is real. Yeah, that's possible, yeah. Yeah, for sure, I'd say that would definitely count as evidence of Jesus. If we did discover on every different planet, they all believed in Jesus or something. So I'd say that the same thing would apply in morality, that if there is this consistent pattern in things that are both evolved and not evolved, human societal and whatever other alien and AIs species there are, I think this would definitely be something we should take seriously as a real potential. Perhaps, so, okay, so let's, so, I'll push you on the sun. How do you measure moral progress? What do you think is moral progress? A pattern in the same direction. So whether or not you call it progress or not isn't important, what matters is, is there a consistent pattern to the way in which the moral inclinations change? And if there is a consistent pattern in that, whether you call it a progress or a regress, doesn't matter. What matters is, is like, if you see a bunch of rocks pointed in the sand, whether you call it up or down, who cares, there's still a specific pattern in the sand. So, how do we, what does the pattern look like? For me, I define it as any involuntary position of will as a moral or the extreme would be like, it would be, a perfect world would be one where there's, it's impossible to force anyone to do anything they don't consent to. And so that would be the direction that I'm thinking is going in, based on my model. What, why does that have to be morality? Doesn't have to be, it's just the conclusion of what I see as the pattern in moral progress. So I see things changing like LGBTQ rights, women's rights, voters' rights, animal rights. It seems like, as we gain in technology and intellectual acuity, it seems that our scope of freedoms increases, that we want people to have more freedom to do what they want to do without being forced to do things that aren't. Sure, but what do you point to, to say that like, this is an example of progress? Like, what if I say, well, I'm measuring more progress by the average weight of a person? And I say that our society is progressing because we weigh more and more. Like, what's to say that your measurement of progress is better or worse than my measurement of progress? The place that I'm going to this is that, on an ethics or an epistemic level, when I'm trying to get you to, it seems like you're invoking normativity to kind of prove normativity. So I'm asking you like, how do you know that moral progress is happening? And you're giving me a discreet set of things like, well, these people are gaining more liberation or these people have more choices or these people have less involuntary things based towards, I'm just saying, well, why do you value what is like a voluntary and involuntary action? It seems like to even have that value, you already have to invoke some level of ethics to get there. And that level of ethics, I just don't know where that comes from. By level of ethics, you mean like moral intuitions. Yeah, I definitely feel like we have intuitions towards some things being moral and some things not being moral. And those would be like the phenomenon of morality. And is there a pattern in this phenomenon that we use the word morality to refer to? I would say yes. And then that would be those feelings we have towards those specific things. Does that have a pattern? And if yes, then we're gonna call that moral progress because we use the term morality to refer to that set of phenomenon as opposed to other sets of phenomenon. Sure, so then one big issue that I have at the beginning of this, how do you observe a moral fact? Usually these conversations boil down to some level of intuition. My earlier problem with two people disagreeing on a moral fact is there's no way to resolve that disagreement. So if you have two people with juxtaposed moral intuitions, how do you solve for that? So say we have two men and they both wanna get married. Now it seems like in your intuition, we have less of an imposition of involuntary action, right? So they're able to get married, but a religious person or another type of person might look at those two people and say, well, this is immorality, like society's just sending it to chaos, we are not being boiled to our bodies, we're not acting, the function of a man is not to follow the form of a man being, like with another man that this doesn't work this way. How do you resolve the disagreement between these two people who look at one as moral progress and another as a moral regression? Yeah, so two ways, one would be epistemically, we would look at essentially if we had access to all the different alien species, we could look at theirs and say, so this species has progressed to this point technologically and intellectually, what do they do? And this one has progressed to this point, what do they do? And if the pattern holds in one direction, we could find out who's right and who's wrong. And then if we get to the point where we can actually measure this field, we could literally just check the field and say, well, what is it indicating? But until then I would compare it to the evidence since he doesn't follow the pattern and the evidence, which one corresponds best to the pattern. Yeah, but again, we're kind of begging the question with the pattern, that's my issue, is how do we justify that that pattern is an example of moral progress, I guess. Invoking a hypothetical alien species is hard because we have no alien species to look at. Invoking the existence of a tool to measure morality is hard because we can't measure morality. And then even going by technological progress is, I think, almost begging the question because you're already assuming that technological progress is a good thing. So for instance, I don't know. I wouldn't say it was a good thing, I wouldn't say it's just a pattern in the phenomenon. So as our technological ability increases, so does our feelings of morality, our scope of morality. So the technology there is just something I would expect to cause these feelings to change. Yeah, I guess, it feels like people, I mean, intuitively I would agree with that because I like technology. But I lived in Nebraska for 30 years. I know there's a lot of people that live in rural areas that would compare themselves to technologically sophisticated city related areas and they would not see moral progress there. A lot of them actually would say there's a lot of moral decay that happens there. That the lives that people live in cities are more isolated, there's more moral decay, there's more isolation from one another. So even if you could point to that, let's say a hypothetical alien species existed where there was a lot of technological progress and then they acted in certain ways and we would call these ways like indicative of their moral system. Other people might not even look at that as moral progress. To go all the way back again, it feels like in order to say, I believe in morality because it follows some pattern. The question is always gonna be, well how do you define that pattern? That's where the interesting question is, not like if we have a pattern, is it going in one way, but rather what is the pattern we're looking for? And I don't know why we would point to one pattern, such as some sort of progress in technology or longevity or whatever, first another pattern that might be how faithful are we to our friends and families, how much do we believe in God or Jesus or any other type of pattern that people might, I guess, hold themselves against. Well I would say that when you plot out all the different data points on a graph and you can assess the graph in many different ways, it will change like how straight the line is or how much it corresponds to a particular direction rather than another. And so if it does, if there's one set of criteria that you put on the x-axis and one set on the y-axis, that makes it like a more straight line. That would be more indicative of that being the underline principle that it's following rather than one that makes it a much more jagged line where the p-values don't correspond to a straight line and it's a much more jagged thing. So I think if we can come off with different principles and different sets of criteria to put on like the x-axis and the y-axis and compare which one does it seem that promotes the best straightest line would give us an indication of which one is probably more correct than the others. Okay, I feel like we're gonna circle around on this a lot. So I agree that you can do that but it seems like all of the work that you're doing is in the following the data but the questions that we're having that are relevant to morality are preceding the graphing of the data and it's the choosing of the data. That's the hard part. So for instance, if you were to tell me I wanna measure moral progress using this and then you wanna graph it with this and you wanna graph, I'd say, okay, that's cool. Okay, I don't care about that. My question is how do you choose which points to plot? Like how do you choose what values you wanna measure? Because that's always going to be where the moral question lies. So for instance, somebody might say, well, I'm gonna plot it based on the average number of computers or cell phones that exist in a nation because I think the more you have of that the more technological you can answer. And then you can say, oh, well look, we're making a lot of progress. Somebody else might say, well, I wanna graph the average self-reported happiness level of a woman in society. And that's kind of gone up and down a little bit. Maybe somebody else says, I wanna graph it based on the number of people that have reported 80 to your depression. Well, that's gonna go down. Or maybe you wanna graph it based on the incidences of cancer. That's also gonna go down but that's because we're living longer. So all of these are complicated and the graphs and the charts are interesting but the normative questions are preceding the data. I think we wanna make it about the data but the problem is the question is actually which data are we choosing and why? Because different people are going to value different data. I don't see that as a problem because in ethics, in morality, we do have a pretty collective understanding of what morality refers to. Like killing a baby is immoral. Killing a baby for fun is immoral. We can label a certain set of actions as morally significant and a certain set of other actions as not morally significant, picking up a rock or whatever. And so there isn't really much ambiguity there where it's a difficulty in establishing what we think of as moral phenomenon. The difficulty is in corresponding to show that those feelings are more than just feelings. So I think that which phenomenon we should label is determined by our intuitions. Like we have a sense of what is moral. And the question is, is that more than just evolutionary byproducts? Is it doesn't correspond to something more? And so determining which data points we're assessing is really easy, our intuitions do that for us. The question is, is it more than that? So I don't really find the difficulty in delineating certain actions as being morally significant and others as not. So I agree with this, that we seem to have strong intuitions towards certain actions. But this is, so I kind of attack Sam Harris because he makes similar arguments to this. But the problem is that every time Sam Harris will invoke, like, oh, well, this is how we know what is good or bad. It's always usually like a really obvious example of like, should we throw acid in a person's face? Should we stab somebody in the back with a knife? Obviously these are no. But in that case, I would say that our moral intuitions are probably relatively unchanged from 10,000 years ago. Even way back then, murdering a friend is a bad thing, raping somebody is a bad thing, stabbing somebody is a bad thing. But I think that when the moral questions become more complicated, I think that relying on those basic intuitions becomes much more challenging. So you brought up killing babies as an example, and I can point to the huge divide we have in the US over whether or not we should be pro or anti-abortion. As like, this is like a, I don't know how we can just make an observation to determine using moral fact what the right or wrong answer is here. It seems like we have to bring in a whole bunch of outside stuff that we can't just observe. It's gonna be more immaterial in nature, I guess. I'm not sure what you mean there, because it's like if we can determine at what point consciousness exists, we can probably end the debate, I would assume. Like if we can determine there is a soul that goes into it at this point, and it's literally a conscious being, then that would end the debate, whether it's one way or the other. I don't know if that's true or not. If even if you told a religious person a baby is not conscious, because I think a religious person would agree, there is no consciousness at day two. The parts just aren't there for it. Why isn't that the whole argument that like literally a soul goes into the conception? Well, a soul and a consciousness are two separate things. Well, I'm using those synonymously, so if a soul was conscious. Sure, if there was someone to make sure a soul. But the problem is, is it seems to be the case, and now I know you said in the future this may change, and if it does, that would be awesome, because it would make these kinds of debates pointless, which would be cool. But it seems to be that there are some things that we reach for to establish morality that come out of the observable and out of the like 100% provable. So when we look at like a soul entering a body, it seems to be the case that if souls exist, they're immaterial, we have no way to measure them, we have no way to perceive them. So how do we make an argument over whether or not it should or shouldn't be respected? If we could one day in the future, no, because your question, your statement was, is that there wasn't some fact we could look at to know one way or the other. If we could know that this is the point it becomes conscious, whether that's a soul-based consciousness or a chemical-based consciousness, there is this fact that it's presumably knowable about the universe that could tell us one way or the other that would presumably end the debate regardless of whether or not we can know it now. Yeah, I agree, but it seems like a lot of the conversation from your point basically revolves around if one day we develop a tool and if that tool is able to measure a system that we are assuming exists now, then it will justify everything I'm saying. That may be true, but until we have a way to measure that field or that tool is developed, it's only like a thought. I'm going earlier than I'm saying if we can discover other species and see the same pattern in other species, that is sufficient enough for my point. Obviously if we could prove it empirically, that would be, there'd be no point of debate. Sure, but then also on the flip side, I could say what if we observed another species and they live a radically different life? That would be a counterpoint, like you mentioned earlier. Yeah, but we both have equal evidence for either of these things existing so it seems there's no point in hypothesizing about either existence, no? I think that would apply with anything in science. You make a prediction and then it goes the wrong way then obviously that's evidence against the hypothesis. Yeah, but typically the whole point of my understanding is that a general hypothesis is usually something that it arises from two things. Either one, you have a contradiction in a current model or an unexplainable phenomenon in a current model, or two, you're trying to develop an explanation for something that you currently don't have an explanation for, which I guess is the kind of sentence number one. So right now we don't need to bring in moral fact to explain anything I think in human existence or in our existence. And two, I don't think we have a contradiction in any of our models anywhere that is showing like, oh god, we can't explain this behavior, we must need morality. So it seems like assuming or trying to generate hypotheses for moral fact in the universe when we have no reason to assume it exists or even that we needed to exist, it seems kind of strange I guess. Well I would disagree there, I would say that if we did see this pattern across different species, that's something that would be highly unexpected. That would be a thing that we wouldn't expect given our current understanding and so if we did see that it would be very strange and we wouldn't need to add something to explain it. Okay, yeah, true, if we see things that are unexplained in the future we would need to explain them, I agree. Any other questions? No, that's it. Okay. Do we do like a Q and A thing or what? Yeah, sounds good. Hi. Hey. Do you want to come up so you can like speak into the mic so we can get you on the camera? Okay. I'm not very sure how I'm supposed to do this. Just hold it like that. Okay, can you just stand back here or? Okay. Would you like to sit on my lap? Okay, so, so TJ, were you basically, I guess were you basically arguing on behalf of like religion or like I guess like kind of curious like, I guess like what was your main point for the morality? So my main point for morality is that there seems to be a pattern. What do you need a mic to? Yeah, can I borrow your mic? Yeah, so I'm an atheist. So I don't believe in the God at all, but I do believe there is objective morality. Most philosophers are atheists and they also believe in objective morality. So my goal is to show why this is a reasonable belief system. Like we can say, yeah, there's this pattern here and we think this pattern extends far beyond the human element. And so this is a reasonable thing to believe even if you don't believe in a God. So I believe in objective morality as an atheist and I want to show why that's completely reasonable. Okay. All right. That just was my own question. Cool. I have a lot of stuff here. Any other questions? Okay, cool.