Why don't you talk about both the good and the bad things the Age of Enlightenment has brought to us? Or maybe you cannot think of any.
I'm more and more scared by people like you. You are a prime example of an ideologist: you just tell one side of the story and hide (or ignore) the other.
I guess your intentions are good (at least on the conscious level) but the way you extol rationality is quite dangerous.
What bad are you referring to? I don't know what other side you're referring to but being able to read, write, have an Internet, have cures for diseases, are pretty good. So what bad side of the Enlightenment is relevant to our lives?
To me and in my opinion, rationality is what makes us human. It's our ability to reason at a very high level due to our neo-cortex and frontal lobes which make us distinctly human.
As far as "dangerous" goes, dangerous would assume there is an agenda to keep people ignorant? I suppose I am dangerous to that because I don't desire to remain ignorant nor support any agenda of involuntary ignorance. If self empowerment makes me dangerous then it's the justified kind of dangerous, or at least justifiable to an individualist. Individualism simply means to think for yourself. Rationality, simply means to protect yourself to the best of your ability, to do what you can to give yourself a good life, or a comfortable life, if you desire to have that, and to even improve your environment and those around you so as to have a greater probability that your future self will have a good life.
My intentions for supporting the idea of anti-aging? I'm not enjoying getting old, and would prefer to slow it down. If anyone else feels the same way about that then let's pool our resources toward slowing down a process none of us desire or enjoy. Yes it's very rational, and if you're looking for an ideologically relevant interpretation then you have ethical egoism, you have egoist anarchism, both which inevitably will lead to the same conclusions on anti-aging for those who don't like the idea of getting old.
Rationality is a means to an end. Rationality is useful because it's the key behind effectiveness in whatever it is you do. If it's altruism then effective altruism is simply rational altruism. If it's survival then effective survival most of the time is rational. If it's medicine then evidence based medicine tends to be rational and tends to produce better results than belief centered medicine.
Anyone is free to live their life how they choose. I'm not someone who wants to force or demand anyone become rational if they don't want to. Nor do I demand people give up their beliefs even if their beliefs are incorrect, wrong, ignorant, or proven false. I do not have any fixed beliefs myself, so I'll have to admit that I don't and that anything I believe right now will be completely changed no matter what it is, if the evidence guides me to change it.
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Shall I remind you the main events of the 20th century?
And without rationality, without a new Age of Enlightenment in a decentralized global context, what makes you think we will be able to avoid the possible trajectory with AI being abused by some of the most ignorant people?
AI can be used to help people or not. But I don't think AI is going to automatically be used to help people if people don't save science. Philosophy is important as well and as I said there will be residual effects of augmenting the rationality of individuals in that you'll get more effective ethics.
We already see some of this actually but not enough.
The implications for my post and response:
So this means I recognize my own ignorance and human limitations. I know I'm biased, I know I'm ignorant, I know I'm flawed, and the only way to overcome my human flaws is by having a process (reason, logic, calculation, measurement) to determine the effectiveness of any belief, concept, process, etc. If I believed something enough to form a hypothesis and test it out, and in the test I find it didn't work? Well it's time for me to update my beliefs!
Belief revision is not easy, but it's necessary. I spend most of my life being wrong and making mistakes and if I cannot revise my beliefs I cannot learn, grow, improve.
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You say it yourself, just conveniently forgetting to mention the bad outcomes:
One could say that all that happened in the 20th century is the result of people falling in love with the products of their minds. And yes, this includes events in Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba.
The rational mind is capable of both spectacular achievements and absolute disasters. It becomes a dangerous tool when not grounded in morality. And morality is beyond the rational, it cannot be derived from science. It's been tried on many occasions in the 20 century and it failed. You want to try again?
Sounds familiar? This is what modern descendants of Marxism are happy to tell you.
Let's discuss Germany. Germany had an ideology (Nazism) which was more like a religion than anything rational. Ideology can at times be rational but often is not rooted in rationality. If an ideology is rooted in pseudoscience, ignorance, hate, etc, then it's not necessarily rational.
If we look at Communism then we also see an ideology which under Marx did actually use Enlightenment era concepts and compared to many other ideologies it was very rational. The problem with Communism is it was also anti-individualist (this is also the same problem with Nazism), and to be a good communist means to give up your individualism completely and conform everything to being a good communist. I'll give you credit here that they were rational, and effective, but used rationality (the tool) to push for something which I consider to be irrational (collective identity, anti-individualism). So while I can say the means were rational, their ends were at least in my own opinion irrational for anyone who desires to be an individualist with an ego of their own.
As far as China, North Korea, etc, again we are talking about governments here. The individual is diminished for the nation in these contexts and it's not voluntary. Individuals everywhere are required to diminish themselves and disempower themselves for nationalism, or for family, or for big society, or whatever else. Yet to be rational (means to an end) is merely to be effective and I'm speaking about being effective individuals not speaking about any particular ideology.
Yes but the problem with Marxism is that it was required that everyone submit to the state, to the government, to the commune, or collective, or society, etc. It's requirement of conformity is one of the main problems but it's also the problem of any authoritarian state. At the same time empowering the individual is more about giving yourself the ability to make better decisions, to live a more effective life, to potentially live a much longer life.
I accept your point that there are dangers but in my opinion the majority of the dangerous you mentioned as possible examples came from ignorance (partial Enlightenment). People were and still are guided by ignorance, yet with moments of Enlightenment mixed in, and while the Enlightenment led to great leaps in technology, it didn't mean the majority of people just because of the Enlightenment and ability to read and write will suddenly make wise decisions, think better, etc.
So the risks we have with AI is that we can have a bunch of ignorant people with bots to abuse. That is a legitimate risk in my opinion. But in my opinion the biggest risk is if people who want to stop being ignorant are not allowed to do so because we don't have access to the AI to help us not be ignorant. So the distinction is between people who are voluntarily ignorant and people who are involuntarily ignorant, and right now because AI and other tech doesn't exist or isn't accessible, it's mostly involuntary.
How can we individuals do better if we don't have the tools to help ourselves be better?
Yes, it acted like religion, and Nazi Germany is an example of what happens when you have vacuum afer removing religion. And it was the rational mind that determined religion to be unnecessary.
No, it means that you get killed if don't conform. Quite similar to being excluded as "bigot" or "racist", if you don't comply with the multicultural policy.
You are right about protection of the individual as being the essential pillar of society. What is the rational / scientific justification for this? I cannot think of any. Maybe because this argument does not belong to science.
The rational justification for defense of the individual is all persons are individuals and rational persons as individuals would be rational to empower the individual. It's clearly rational to empower the individual but this can also go too far and become dangerous to the majority of individuals.
The balance is you want to not constrain or restrict individual growth and development. This means involuntary ignorance at least in my opinion should be made voluntary or at least a lot less involuntary. By allowing people to make wise decisions more often and by giving AI access to all we can actually improve all individuals. If all individuals improve then everything those individuals touch gets improved and because everyone is connected and increasingly so each day, it's a way to improve your future.
You are right that individualism doesn't belong to science because science doesn't answer philosophical questions. Science answers more fundamental questions about how stuff works. Engineering answers the questions on how to build stuff from the knowledge of how stuff works. And philosophy gives us the reasoning, the logic, the ethics, from which to build stuff which works and is long term sustainable.
So it's not enough to build a new society, but we have to build a better one. We need a new era of Enlightenment to even attempt to build anything better than what we have. Decentralized oppression and ignorance isn't better. Look at the Internet and you see a lot of ignorance, disinformation, and not a lot of improvements to society and life comes from that.
Yet the Internet also has search engines, Wikipedia, word processors, blockchains, and more, which help people to research better, think better, work better, etc. So we need to build the tools in my opinion with pro-science in mind, with the deliberate intention to increase participation not just in capitalism, finance, but also in science. It's not enough to simply make people rich in $$$ by these massive wealth transfers like we see with cryptocurrency, but we also have to make people rich in knowledge which is actually harder but also longer lasting, sustainable, and will have the residual effect of improving ethics.
So the question "how stuff works?" is for you more fundamental to the question "how to live properly?". I don't think that's really true. Thus science actually deals with less fundamental questions.
But how do you decide which one is "better" if science doesn't deal with value systems?
If I don't know how stuff works then I don't even know what life is, or what living is, or how to live at all. So how can I focus on how to live property if I don't know what living is?
If you don't know you need to drink water, eat food, require certain vitamins, etc, then you will not live for very long and all those questions about what is proper are quite irrelevant.
I believe it all starts with knowing yourself, and knowledge of self comes from science. Once you know yourself then you can focus on yourself in relation to others using philosophy.
Whatever you prefer is what is better for you. It's not for science to decide what you prefer. Science simply generates knowledge, how the stars work, how physics work, how the human body works.
Morality in my opinion is super-rational. It's what is best for yourself and others based on consequences of any particular action. There is no objective morality in my opinion because there is no way to determine what is best for everyone with any strong degree of accuracy but you can determine what you prefer for your own life and you can help others to help you help yourself.
Morality is something I've posted about when discussing AI, Tauchain, etc, in my blog posts. I just have the opinion that rationality and morality converge.
Effective applied ethics being an ethics shown to produce consistently good results for those who follow it. If we are discussing any principle, law, rule, moral, it's value is in the result is produces and not the ideological beliefs it produces. If a law produces very negative results, then it doesn't matter to me if the law came from a Marxist, a Capitalist, it simply is a bad law. And a good law, the ideology which generated is irrelevant to me, it's either good or bad law. Same for best practices, if you arrive at best practices it's because it's what works and you can have humans of many different cultures and ideologies arrive at the same best practices over time by rational means of trial and error.
I suppose where we disagree is your statement that morality is beyond rational. I don't agree with that because no absolute morality can produce consistently good outcomes. Any rule will produce a good or bad outcome depending on particular circumstances. Any best practice is only for certain narrow circumstances, such as what to do if x or what actions to take to prevent y. But the way we discovered those best practices is by the rational mind, by someone doing it and people seeing the consequences of it.
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What's rational about taking others into consideration? Isn't a psychopath the most rational human being one could imagine?
Or I could reverse the question: tell me what is irrational about being a psychopath?
If I offer some help to a stranger that's quite irrational because chances are I'll never get anything back for my trouble. While a psychopath doesn't have this problem, all his/her acts are 100% rational.
No, psychopaths clinically are impulsive, lack empathy, and are no more rational than anyone else. The distinguishing feature of a psychopath is the lack of empathy but when psychopaths act impulsively on anger then it's not rational.
It's rational to take others into consideration because cooperation is more effective (long term) than competition. If you compete with everyone, then it's everyone vs everyone, and it's a state of constant war with no peace. In an environment like that then everything becomes more expensive because no one wants to cooperate with you because you could be competing with them. In the prisoners dilemma cooperation if it can be coordinated is more efficient than competition but if you cannot coordinate well enough to cooperate then it becomes more efficient to betray by default.
Why would you betray by default if you can cooperate by default and be guaranteed to never lose across many games? If you betray by default you might win this game, but eventually you'll be on the losing end.
Reciprocity is rational. If you believe you'll never in life be in the position of the stranger in need of help then perhaps it's not rational to help a stranger. If you could imagine a future instance of yourself in a position where you might need help, then helping the stranger promotes an environment beneficial to you being helped at some point in the future. This is rational as I mentioned, it's superrationality and is reciprocity.
Your assumption that psychopaths are 100% rational is extremely flawed. No human is 100% rational and psychopaths are no more or less rational than anyone else. Humans aren't 100% rational and psychopaths simply act on different emotions rather than empathy.
If a human acts on rationality then it's still possible to arrive at the conclusion to help others based on "enlightened self interest" which is to say that you want to create a trend, or a culture where people help each other and cooperate. A cooperative culture could be something you want to create for your own selfish reasons because it's more beneficial to you. Maybe it lowers your blood pressure to not have to be stressed, and so you think you'll live a longer life if you have less competition, and promoting cooperation is a way to reduce the competitiveness of life.
In my opinion competition shouldn't be the first resort. If an individual can get what they want from life through cooperation (and if you're smart about it then often you can), then there is no reason to force a competition. If you can give a stranger something they want, you never really know what the next person can do for you in the future or how that stranger is connected to you. The unknown interconnections between strangers encourages people (for rational reasons) to help complete strangers, but of course it depends on the kind of help. It's probably not rational to help any stranger at your own expense, so I'm not saying it's rational to run into a burning building to save the life of a stranger unless it's your job to do that.
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Absolutely wrong. A psychopath knows exactly what the other person feels and is able to play those emotions to his own advantage.
A proper psychopath never acts impulsively or is driven by his own anger. That's why he can be so manipulative and powerful.
Psychopaths aren't capable of empathy. Having knowledge of something doesn't mean having an understanding. I know how you feel if you tell me how you feel. I don't understand how you feel unless I relate it to how I felt when in your position.
Of course the above experiment is a bit flawed but it does indicate that psychopaths do not experience empathy in the way neurotypicals do. It is equivalent to saying that psychopaths have a diminished capacity for understanding certain cues and signals.
Psychopaths by definition are impulsive or they wouldn't be clinically diagnosed as psychopaths. Also, the human you describe doesn't exist. Any psychopath is also a human. Any human also has emotions, and which emotions the human will respond to differs from person to person. A psychopath without a short temper might easily get jealous, or may be tempted in many other ways away from rationality. The fact is, the idea of "proper psychopath" like you see in series like Dexter is not based off reality. If you look at actual clinically diagnosed psychopaths, you will never find a "proper psychopath" immune to being manipulated.
Finally I will note, anyone can be manipulative and powerful. Psychopaths do not have a monopoly on being manipulative and powerful. Manipulative is a learned skill, and power is acquired. Terrorists and gangsters can be manipulative and powerful, but not necessarily psychopaths or rational.
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