David Hume identified the useful distinction between is and ought.
For most of my life I've adhered to this idea - however I've come to believe, against my own protests, that the universe does, in fact, embed something like a moral code. Or more like a challenge. When we look upon it, we see a vast, empty thing, devoid of any evidence of life. The biosphere of Earth is the most precious "substance" that exists because it is the most unique. It is also the only place where this discussion can take place, since the rest of the universe is (apparently) rather dead.
So, I don't think the universe has anything to say about hat sizes or personal sexual proclivities (and indeed wrt sex the universe seems to wear its freak flag proudly given that the life-cycles of many critters involves...questionable activity). But it does say that surviving is very hard - It is quite difficult to escape a gravity well, and many OOM harder to get to another system fast enough that your craft and crew doesn't die of old age.
(I've come to believe too that there is a positive side to this setup: if it were easier to move around, there would be horrible chaos as so cheerily depicted in assorted space opera novels. It would be colonialism writ large, victimizing trillions instead of millions. And most likely humans would be the exploited and not the exploiters, not that it matters.)
What's interesting though is that the problem of spreading life beyond earth seems extremely hard-- but its not theoretically impossible. It's going to take time, which means humans need to find a stable space in which to dwell for a long time while we build planet-spanning particle colliders, or whatever else we need to do to figure out how to send vehicles to other stars. Creativity exists in tension with stability, which is an interesting place to end a conversation about how to pass The Great Filter.
The theory of spreading Life Beyond Earth has obstacles that I've never seen it adequately approach.
It suffers from worldwide popularized optimism to which it early succumbs without a proper fight. That it doesn't have to, much like other nationalistic fictions, indicates its low possibility. It is a theory that claims legitimacy without ever stepping into the ring. Which is the proper positioning for meatbags that can't take the pummeling of the infinite gorilla of space. Or more precisely, who can't physically survive the trauma of being separated from their Mother(Earth).
People get all of the space travel that they require from the next Chris Pine Star Trek film. That's psychologically enough for the world. The gap between now and survivable manned travel to Mars is so large that no one can see the opposite shore. An educated wager might be that this is because it doesn't exist. But again, one has to abandon addiction to popular optimism to start down the road of analyzing why. Start with the simple factor of our circadian rhythm that is inseparably tied to the Earth's clock that is uniquely a product of the relationship of this specific Earth to our specific Sun. Don't include how the Earth's gravity or magnetic field may play parts, as that's too advanced as of yet. Before we would get to lethal space radiation, we have to figure out how to survive even in otherwise perfectly safe synthetic conditions. It's unclear to the point that we haven't started the discussion.
I want to meet the man who is going to have the vaccine, ahead of time and before a truly apocalyptic pandemic, for space infections picked up from space-victims of space-colonialism by the eternal oppressors of Earth (hard to accomplish that much oppression in infinite space but ok) .
The Universe has plenty to say about both hat sizes and sex.
Yes, that is certainly true. It bothers me that I can't explain why Asimov, for example, didn't refrain from silly FTL fantasy when he knew better, even then. I pity the science-optimists who claim victory and hope with every advance, but then ignore the constraints who's reality undergird every advance (esp relativity, in this case).
>That's psychologically enough for the world
The universe, or God if you prefer, has thrown down the gauntlets and left us in a default dead state. This is urgent on a long time scale. Fantasy calling itself "science fiction" does damage to our collective physical intuitions, and our intuitions about the future. (A fact which has not gone unnoticed by those with the means to fund such entertainments). But in truth I don't care about what the world wants, I care about keeping it alive long enough to become multi-system. Then, sure, entertain yourself to death if you want. It's only one world, at that point. The last few years have greatly revised (downward) my estimate of modern human knowledge of science, and reality in general. Until then, yeah, if NASA were to come out strongly in favor of protecting our collective scientific minds by requiring virtually all "science fiction" to be relabeled "fantasy", I'd be for it. Why do we assume that children must be protected from sexual imagery but warping their physical intuition is fine??
>The Universe has plenty to say about both hat sizes and sex.
Not at the scale I'm talking about. The nihilistic, self-amusing jokes of the cynic who lies to himself and says he doesn't care, that he is courageously indifferent, show fear. Total, abject fear.
Not sure if you were looking for response to your proposals, but…
I think one of the real problems in implementing this sort of policy, i.e. ensuring that, as a society, individuals (particularly the young) are taught correctly about physical reality is that from a western mindset any measures taken will appear authoritarian. The history of ‘western’ thought, in the tradition of the enlightenment and what followed, is inherently tied to Judeo-Christian ethics and morals. Further, there is a huge pattern of individualism that runs through the core of that same philosophical lineage. It is this basis that allows for the dual positions you allude to in your comment. Traditional ‘western’ thought would enforce the rightness of the society impinging on an individual when it is motivated by Judie-Christian (or at least some interpretation thereof) ideals/morals/precepts. Whereas, impinging on an individual with ‘mere’ facts about the physical world is intolerable because the physical world is clearly an unholy/flawed/unknowable place that only exists to further the goals of a deity in being more deific.
All that to say, unfortunately, given the conditioning of culture that has occurred for the last 500 years in the ‘west’ it seems unlikely to me that any societal commitment to correct physical intuition (and the subsequent marking of non-real things as non-realistic/fantasy/imaginary) will never happen. I honk this also answers the question of why protect children from sexual content, but not from unrealistic scifi. To force those labels would be argued to be authoritarian, and it would probably be supported with slippery slope arguments pointing toward the ‘authority’s’ eventual labeling of religious content as well.
>from a western mindset any measures taken will appear authoritarian
I have opened my authoritarian kimono then. We do great harm to our children feeding them fantasy and dressing it up as high-technology. It took me, a nerdy and rather credulous kid, a long time to unlearn the bad intuitions of science fiction, particularly around thermodynamics and FTL. It's remarkable how many people still believe that breaking the light barrier is just like breaking the sound barrier, and it will happen any day now.
I was just thinking that very few people have even caught up with science as of 1905. All the science done since then has been stunning, but only because of the intuitions built in the previous century. Without those intuitions to violate, modern science becomes all but inscrutable - and made even more so by poorly labeled fantasy.
>The history of ‘western’ thought, in the tradition of the enlightenment and what followed, is inherently tied to Judeo-Christian ethics and morals.
Yes, humans have several meaningful dogs in this race. "The West" is the dog I was raised in, and the one I honestly like the most, by a country mile. But I think it's entirely possible that "The West" can't pass the GF. "The West" as a dog is rather vapid and lazy and consumer-y who doesn't make much anymore. It's fat and sated so piles of meat aren't enough to get it out of bed. How does such a dog deal with an urgent crisis on a long time scale, especially in the absence of basic scientific consensus among its people? It may turn out that an authoritarian dog, like China or Russia, may pass the GF where The West fails.
I do know that unless awareness grows about the Great Filter, and where we actually stand in relation to it, we will certainly fail. Perhaps the next Great Game won't center around Afghanistan, but rather around protecting life on Earth and spreading life beyond Earth. It seems foolish to say it, but perhaps a powerful person or ten will turn away from their own self-interest to focus on this difficult and long-term task.
> For most of my life I've adhered to this idea - however I've come to believe, against my own protests, that the universe does, in fact, embed something like a moral code
So what if it does?
> So, I don't think the universe has anything to say about [..] personal sexual proclivities
Wow - who on earth would have believed that your pre-supposed moral sensibilities would both be completely correct and even coded into the fabric of the universe itself.
If the universe does in fact have a moral code as you suggest, there is every reason to think it might speak against anti-social behaviours and codes of sexual ethics that inhibit family formation and reproduction.
I feel like if you were on the ISS and the crew stopped to admire a particularly beautiful view of Earth, you'd be the one to start complaining about...something. Whether or not your complaint is legitimate, the fact that you'd pick this moment, this thread, to complain about your favorite little topic, means you've missed the point entirely. (This is the most common failure mode among humans, so you're in good company).
I'm not advancing a view about sexual ethics, I'm just amused that you believe that your own pre-conceived notions about sexual ethics must agree with a universal moral order which is also a fact of nature. How convenient.
> I feel like if you were on the ISS and the crew stopped to admire a particularly beautiful view of Earth, you'd be the one to start complaining about...something
Again this is just your prejudice. You dont know anything about me.
That's the thing though, it's not absence at all. He's alluding to consent-based morality - a moral system that is both disastrous and unlivable in practice.
You can't have an absence of notions when it comes to morality. At some point each person acts in the real world, and all actions are knowingly or unknowingly directed by a moral framework
Telescopes can only show us what was, not what is.
I had expected the article to be about overturning Lemaitre's Big Bang Theory, both because Lemaitre was a Catholic priest and his theory is very neatly Catholic and because Kant's sense of moral law is something at the core of the way everything works.
The article did not talk about that. It talked around it, but not about it.
Given the number of people who try to derive Is from Ought, maybe giving more people a better view of what is will keep them from listening to the ones attempting to make a new reality.
Why? The same people who support the idea behind this article, support the idea that men and women are equal, for example, because they think it ought to be so.
And there's a lot more things they say ought to be true that I won't enumerate here because my account will be banned
Using your example, the way in which men and women are meant to be equal has no basis in objective reality, just as much the claim that men and women are not equal has no such basis either.
Regarding the realm of “is”, we can plainly see men and women are biologically different. But that’s not the argument. The argument is over the question: “should men and women be allowed to share equivalent roles in society, if they desire?”
The language can get murky. When someone says, “men and women are equal” I highly doubt they mean that they are equal in the biological or any empirical sense. What they probably mean is, “men and women ought to be equals in society.”
On the contrary, some think that “men and women ought not to be equals in society.”
I would wager that those many other examples that you think would get you banned from HN fall safely in the camp of “how ought we treat people?”
So I’m the end I doing think the JWST is going to change anything here.
>The argument is over the question: “should men and women be allowed to share equivalent roles in society, if they desire?”
I think that question is settled, more or less. People usually aren't debating whether a certain person occupying a certain role should be permitted or not.
The real question that seems to be asked now is more along the lines of: "is the fact that we don't pursue certain roles in society equally a sign of our own inherent wickedness?"
It doesn't need to be wickedness. It's group thinking. In general, people want to belong to a group or groups. Then it is easy to fall into the trap of us-vs-them thinking. Also animals show this behavior.
Also, people want to find meaning, and they use their pattern matching instincts to accomplish that. This explains why people tend to see meaning in for example pictures captured by giant telescopes, or shooting stars for that matter. It's the reason why they built it in the first place.
Right, wrong, ought, shall,... all invented by people. The universe only has 'is' and 'was', no 'ought'.
Have been reading "What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies" by Tim Urban? I've been loving it, and he talks about the importance of 2 counterparties identifying what _is_, before distinguishing what _should be_.
>How you ought to live depends heavily upon the axioms you choose, and the axioms that do not coincide with nature and physics are often foolish.
How are you defining "natural"?
We treated each other, and animals, pretty horribly for centuries. This was 'natural'. Then we reasoned about what makes for the kinds of societies where the most number of people can flourish. Certainly not natural, nor foolish.
The central issue is that a telescope can show you what is. It can never tell you how people ought to live.
The is-ought distinction is the boundary of science into philosophy, ethics, religion and politics.
The article is a transparent attempt hand-wave away this distinction.