This might be my misinterpretation/mischaracterization of Longtermism, so someone correct me if I’m wrong, as this is my first time hearing about Longtermism, but it seems like the theory relies on binary oppositions-present vs. future, individual vs. collective, short-term vs. long-term-that reinforce certain hierarchies of value. If this is the case, wouldn’t it be possible that these binaries serve to legitimize the prioritization of abstract, long-term outcomes over the immediate, lived experiences of subjects, mirroring how ideological systems validate power structures through oppositional thinking? By placing “future well-being” as inherently superior, doesn’t longtermism impose a moral framework that devalues present subjects in favor of abstract concepts or optimistic beliefs which could be used to arbitrarily justify any possible act provided its consequences are beneficial at a later time?
I don't think so - it's not that future well-being is viewed as more valuable, quite the opposite. The starting point is that every human is equally valuable, and that what's valuable to humans can somehow be aggregated, so that it makes sense to talk about which outcome is most valuable overall. For example, making 1M people happy is (other things being equal) better than making just 1 person just as happy. That's how longtermism ends up concluding that the best way to benefit the most people is to work towards benefits for the vast numbers of people there'll likely be in the future. (Not sure I agree with this, btw.)
@AtticPhilosophy I'll like to hear you speak more about Longtermism (and perhaps also Global Priorities Research and Effective Altruism)! I find the expected value argument for it to be watertight and basically conclusive, but I am interested to hear you flesh out your doubts into full-blooded objections.
@AtticPhilosophy that makes more sense thinking about it again. Still not quite sure whether or not I agree with Longtermism (as it sort of sounds speculative, though this could also be a misunderstanding on my part). I don’t know much about it other than this video unfortunately; do you have any recommendations for where I can read more about this idea? (Thank you again for clarifying my misunderstanding)
26:20: _"the Copenhagen interpretation makes good sense for idealists, but you know, why should you have to be an idealist just to make sense of our best physics?"_ You shouldn't have to, but I was convinced into a form of idealism by Dr. Bernardo Kastrup and it certainly helps. I would love to see a video about idealism, or maybe you could interview Kastrup himself as he's always open to it.
I am sympathetic to panpsychism and Russelian/ Jamesian monism. To me, it seems to solve many problems that we deal with in the philosophy of mind, like the hard problem of consciousness, but then the combination problem reveals that our understanding of consciousness is still too little. I have to say though, that at first it sounds batshit crazy. I tried explaining it to a group of friends and they probably thought I've lost my mind.
Your talk of hidden variable theories being ruled out is quite imprecise, in fact the very person who wrote the paper that supposedly disproved hidden variable theories (John Bell) was an advocate of a hidden variable theory himself (pilot wave theory) and he was inspired to write his paper because of his exposure to David Bohm's work (the creator for the fully fledged pilot wave theory),because it makes non-locality very explicit in QM, so he wanted to see if he could construct a similar but LOCAL hidden variable theory that gives the same predictions as QM, and he proved mathematically that they would produce different predictions in the right experimental set up, later on his mathematical theory was proved by experiment, and it was shown that the actual results we see line up with QM, and no possible LOCAL hidden variable theory could explain the result, so what was ruled out are specifically LOCAL hidden variable theories. Bohmian mechanics (pilot wave theory) is alive and well and is in fact one of the most popular options for researchers in the foundations of physics Tim Maudlin, David Albert, Sheldon Goldstein being all big proponents of it, while also taking seriously objective collapse theories like GRW, the main divide for philosophers of physics is really between Bohmian Mechanics/GRW camp, versus the Many Worlds camp, with very few philosophers taking interpretations closer to the orthodox interoperation to be that serious as it's plagued with problems.
That's a great clarification, thanks! I imagine local hidden variables was what Einstein had in mind - not sure he'd have been keen on Bohm, but that's just a guess. Do you happen to know?
@AtticPhilosophy Oh yeah for sure Einstein's biggest problem with QM was it's non locality, not it's indeterminism as is often claimed in popular tellings, however he in principle thought a local theory could reproduce all of the QM predictions, he died before Bell's theorem and it's experimental demonstrations, who knows what he would've thought about Bohms work if he knew about the experimental demonstrations of Bells inequality.
20:52 "Must there be some kind of foundation that grounds everything else?" coincidentally that's what my channel is named after. 'The Ungrund' a concept by the shoemaker philosopher Jakob Boehme. Essentially meaning non-ground, an eternal nothing, a state of pure potentiality, which he describes as a 'desiring'. Notably it is not a being or entity, it is the absence of being, the source and origin of all things. It is beyond logic and rationality. It is the un-ground of God, who is the Ground of Being (Paul Tillich). Where the Ungrund is the Abyss, God is Byss.
@@AtticPhilosophy It was adapted by Schelling's 'Ground', it is almost identical to Boehme's but more systematised and doesn't present itself as being 'absolute nothingness', rather it is the ground of all being but still being a positive substratum of being - the darkness that is necessary for light (from obscurity to clarity - potentiality to being). Boehme's dynamism from unmanifest potentiality to being is generated through the divine freedom of God. Boehme's system is very much shrouded in Christian mysticism, while Schelling brings it into German Idealist tradition.
Hi, I really liked the video! I think you should make one about continental realism since the movement touches similr thesis to the ones you mentioned here. Saludos!
What did you have in mind - ideas like object-oriented ontology? I don't know too much about that, but I'm curious as to how it differs from there usual analytic notions of realism (which have always been centered around objects).
Consequentialism in ethics is often formulated in cost-benefit terms and analyses using economic tools. The notion of 'value' in consequentialism isn't financial but is supposed to be whatever is intrinsically valuable for humans. Sometimes economics also looks at other notions of value.
How does longtermism calculate utility for future lives. Does it provide a stance on the ethics of policy now which increases/ decreases future populations? It seems unclear to me why lives which don’t yet exist should be treated with the same consideration of lives which exist currently. Is policy which attempts to maximize the future quality of life for people who are alive today not sufficient??
Well, suppose the government proposes to close all primary schools down in 11 years time. No currently living children will miss out, so it's fine by your policy. But clearly not a good idea, since we'll soon get to a society in which most people lack a basic education. This seems to show that you have to plan for the future, including for people not yet born. Longtermism (rightly or wrongly) extrapolates the thought to the distant future.
@@AtticPhilosophy I see what you mean. I think I was conflating two different ideas in my initial comment and I should have phrased it better. I do believe it’s generally good practice to work now in an attempt to mitigate future problems like climate change. Maybe this is addressed in longtermism, but I think the value of a future life should be weighted by the confidence it will even exist. I know in the video you even address this saying that some estimates very wildly in terms of the population of future humans or even how long humanity will last as a race, and I wonder how someone could make such estimates with any confidence. Maybe I am struggling more with the methodology than the philosophy itself though, but it just feels wrong to make any type of policy based on estimates that could very well be wrong. It is easy for me to accept that there will be humans suffering from climate change on earth in the next 100 years, but how can we possible predict anything about life in the next 10,000 years
I disagree with the critiques of longtermism, for the pacific islander example longtermism would not suggest to just leave those people to die in a flood, on the contrary it would suggest that we help them relocate since there is no helping their island from sinking. We are already for the most part longtermist I would say, typically what is good in the short term is good in the long term as it leads to benficial compounding. The only case I can think of where this wouldn't be true is in non aggregated, non fundementalist ideologies
In that specific example, it depends (according to longtermism) on a cost-benefit analysis: does (eg) re-locating a small number of people now provide more or less benefit overall for humanity than, say, contributing to research to avoid an asteroid collision? It's a probabilistic calculation, which, unfortunately, tend to favour unlikely outcomes for huge numbers of humans over likely benefits for a few.
@AtticPhilosophy If we assume that humans are net producers then in what calculation would you let net producers die to work on an asteroid problem? It assumes that each action demands the same inputs but that obviously isn't true, we can do research on asteroids whilst saving those people
@Betweoxwitegan With finite resources, you have to pick where those resources go. Consequentialists theories say: pick the outcomes with the highest expected net benefit. I'm not saying that's right, just that that's what longtermists usually think. Have a look at the Greaves & MacAskill paper (free online) if you want to know what actual Longtermists say.
@AtticPhilosophy Will do, but finite resources doesn't mean that it's more efficient to put those resources into one major problem, there is a supply issue in everyone focussing on an asteroid problem for example it would actually be less efficient to do so, by all accounts it would be more efficient and thus better to save the people on the island whilst other skilled workers on the asteroid problem. Like this analogy assumes that all variable capital (human labour) is equal which obviously isn't true, you can have finite resources but if there's inequality amongst those resources then it doesn't necessarily follow that all of the resources should be used as an input for one problem
Mechanisms solving the combination problem will be found in the causality of mind in wholeness of purpose and contingency of sum of parts to complete and elegant solution!
In a panpsychic context doesn't the quantum indeterminacy problem collapse? Why? Because with 'something like' consciousness or subjectivity present at every level it is not just the human observer who interacts with quantum events but the whole environment of the quantum event is populated by entities with an interest in the outcome. In this model the telos of the highest order systems would guide all.
I don't think so - a fundamental particle 'thinking' can't count as an observation/measurement of the system it's part of, else systems would never be in superposition.
@@AtticPhilosophy Indeed. It would not collapse itself, but, say, a chlorophyll molecule might 'register' the presence of a suitable photon in its vacinity and capture it into raising its own energy in a LUMO/HOMO transition (LUMO/HOMO nomenclature is inherently problematic, but you may be familiar with the phenmenon, which is straightforward enough). This also overcomes the interesting problem of the collapse of a 'probability field' into a locus many hundreds of times smaller than its own size. 'It' is recognized, and wanted, furthering the telos of the proto-conscious entity. PS Still not worked out how to reply to your last, but will get there eventually, regards, J.
You know philosophy as a field is dead when all the "big new" ideas are centuries old.
This might be my misinterpretation/mischaracterization of Longtermism, so someone correct me if I’m wrong, as this is my first time hearing about Longtermism, but it seems like the theory relies on binary oppositions-present vs. future, individual vs. collective, short-term vs. long-term-that reinforce certain hierarchies of value. If this is the case, wouldn’t it be possible that these binaries serve to legitimize the prioritization of abstract, long-term outcomes over the immediate, lived experiences of subjects, mirroring how ideological systems validate power structures through oppositional thinking? By placing “future well-being” as inherently superior, doesn’t longtermism impose a moral framework that devalues present subjects in favor of abstract concepts or optimistic beliefs which could be used to arbitrarily justify any possible act provided its consequences are beneficial at a later time?
I don't think so - it's not that future well-being is viewed as more valuable, quite the opposite. The starting point is that every human is equally valuable, and that what's valuable to humans can somehow be aggregated, so that it makes sense to talk about which outcome is most valuable overall. For example, making 1M people happy is (other things being equal) better than making just 1 person just as happy. That's how longtermism ends up concluding that the best way to benefit the most people is to work towards benefits for the vast numbers of people there'll likely be in the future. (Not sure I agree with this, btw.)
@AtticPhilosophy I'll like to hear you speak more about Longtermism (and perhaps also Global Priorities Research and Effective Altruism)! I find the expected value argument for it to be watertight and basically conclusive, but I am interested to hear you flesh out your doubts into full-blooded objections.
@AtticPhilosophy that makes more sense thinking about it again. Still not quite sure whether or not I agree with Longtermism (as it sort of sounds speculative, though this could also be a misunderstanding on my part). I don’t know much about it other than this video unfortunately; do you have any recommendations for where I can read more about this idea? (Thank you again for clarifying my misunderstanding)
@@smilez4789 You're welcome!
@@jackeasling3294 Sure, that sounds like a good topic - my thoughts are a bit muddled on Longtermism right now!
26:20: _"the Copenhagen interpretation makes good sense for idealists, but you know, why should you have to be an idealist just to make sense of our best physics?"_
You shouldn't have to, but I was convinced into a form of idealism by Dr. Bernardo Kastrup and it certainly helps. I would love to see a video about idealism, or maybe you could interview Kastrup himself as he's always open to it.
Sure, that's a good call!
❤❤❤
great!!! should you make a video of "The biggest new ideas in philosophy of logic"?
Great video, espically you never implied that those ideas are the progress itself but let them shine because they are new and somehow relatable.
Thanks!
I am sympathetic to panpsychism and Russelian/ Jamesian monism. To me, it seems to solve many problems that we deal with in the philosophy of mind, like the hard problem of consciousness, but then the combination problem reveals that our understanding of consciousness is still too little.
I have to say though, that at first it sounds batshit crazy. I tried explaining it to a group of friends and they probably thought I've lost my mind.
Your talk of hidden variable theories being ruled out is quite imprecise, in fact the very person who wrote the paper that supposedly disproved hidden variable theories (John Bell) was an advocate of a hidden variable theory himself (pilot wave theory) and he was inspired to write his paper because of his exposure to David Bohm's work (the creator for the fully fledged pilot wave theory),because it makes non-locality very explicit in QM, so he wanted to see if he could construct a similar but LOCAL hidden variable theory that gives the same predictions as QM, and he proved mathematically that they would produce different predictions in the right experimental set up, later on his mathematical theory was proved by experiment, and it was shown that the actual results we see line up with QM, and no possible LOCAL hidden variable theory could explain the result, so what was ruled out are specifically LOCAL hidden variable theories.
Bohmian mechanics (pilot wave theory) is alive and well and is in fact one of the most popular options for researchers in the foundations of physics Tim Maudlin, David Albert, Sheldon Goldstein being all big proponents of it, while also taking seriously objective collapse theories like GRW, the main divide for philosophers of physics is really between Bohmian Mechanics/GRW camp, versus the Many Worlds camp, with very few philosophers taking interpretations closer to the orthodox interoperation to be that serious as it's plagued with problems.
excellent comment.
That's a great clarification, thanks! I imagine local hidden variables was what Einstein had in mind - not sure he'd have been keen on Bohm, but that's just a guess. Do you happen to know?
@AtticPhilosophy Oh yeah for sure Einstein's biggest problem with QM was it's non locality, not it's indeterminism as is often claimed in popular tellings, however he in principle thought a local theory could reproduce all of the QM predictions, he died before Bell's theorem and it's experimental demonstrations, who knows what he would've thought about Bohms work if he knew about the experimental demonstrations of Bells inequality.
20:52 "Must there be some kind of foundation that grounds everything else?" coincidentally that's what my channel is named after. 'The Ungrund' a concept by the shoemaker philosopher Jakob Boehme. Essentially meaning non-ground, an eternal nothing, a state of pure potentiality, which he describes as a 'desiring'. Notably it is not a being or entity, it is the absence of being, the source and origin of all things. It is beyond logic and rationality. It is the un-ground of God, who is the Ground of Being (Paul Tillich). Where the Ungrund is the Abyss, God is Byss.
Interesting, that's all news to me!
@@AtticPhilosophy It was adapted by Schelling's 'Ground', it is almost identical to Boehme's but more systematised and doesn't present itself as being 'absolute nothingness', rather it is the ground of all being but still being a positive substratum of being - the darkness that is necessary for light (from obscurity to clarity - potentiality to being). Boehme's dynamism from unmanifest potentiality to being is generated through the divine freedom of God. Boehme's system is very much shrouded in Christian mysticism, while Schelling brings it into German Idealist tradition.
Hi, I really liked the video! I think you should make one about continental realism since the movement touches similr thesis to the ones you mentioned here. Saludos!
What did you have in mind - ideas like object-oriented ontology? I don't know too much about that, but I'm curious as to how it differs from there usual analytic notions of realism (which have always been centered around objects).
I hope one day you will discuss my philosophy! Working on my book.
Ha, snap. Just what the world needs ey, another couple of books on philosophy.
Writing a book is one of the most valuable (but also frustrating!) experiences. Good luck with it!
21:00 I know right. This is what p want
Maybe talk about constructor theory? Not sure if that is discussed in philosophy yet but for sure is an interesting set of ideas.
Good call - although not sure I'm the best person to make a good job of it.
Has there ever been an attempt to combine ethics and economics?
Consequentialism in ethics is often formulated in cost-benefit terms and analyses using economic tools. The notion of 'value' in consequentialism isn't financial but is supposed to be whatever is intrinsically valuable for humans. Sometimes economics also looks at other notions of value.
@@AtticPhilosophyIn fact, "utility" is better defined in economics rather in ethics 😊
Great video glad I found yoy
Thanks!
How does longtermism calculate utility for future lives. Does it provide a stance on the ethics of policy now which increases/ decreases future populations? It seems unclear to me why lives which don’t yet exist should be treated with the same consideration of lives which exist currently. Is policy which attempts to maximize the future quality of life for people who are alive today not sufficient??
Well, suppose the government proposes to close all primary schools down in 11 years time. No currently living children will miss out, so it's fine by your policy. But clearly not a good idea, since we'll soon get to a society in which most people lack a basic education. This seems to show that you have to plan for the future, including for people not yet born. Longtermism (rightly or wrongly) extrapolates the thought to the distant future.
@@AtticPhilosophy I see what you mean. I think I was conflating two different ideas in my initial comment and I should have phrased it better. I do believe it’s generally good practice to work now in an attempt to mitigate future problems like climate change. Maybe this is addressed in longtermism, but I think the value of a future life should be weighted by the confidence it will even exist. I know in the video you even address this saying that some estimates very wildly in terms of the population of future humans or even how long humanity will last as a race, and I wonder how someone could make such estimates with any confidence. Maybe I am struggling more with the methodology than the philosophy itself though, but it just feels wrong to make any type of policy based on estimates that could very well be wrong. It is easy for me to accept that there will be humans suffering from climate change on earth in the next 100 years, but how can we possible predict anything about life in the next 10,000 years
It's a fool question; try what is *Whose* reality?
I disagree with the critiques of longtermism, for the pacific islander example longtermism would not suggest to just leave those people to die in a flood, on the contrary it would suggest that we help them relocate since there is no helping their island from sinking.
We are already for the most part longtermist I would say, typically what is good in the short term is good in the long term as it leads to benficial compounding. The only case I can think of where this wouldn't be true is in non aggregated, non fundementalist ideologies
In that specific example, it depends (according to longtermism) on a cost-benefit analysis: does (eg) re-locating a small number of people now provide more or less benefit overall for humanity than, say, contributing to research to avoid an asteroid collision? It's a probabilistic calculation, which, unfortunately, tend to favour unlikely outcomes for huge numbers of humans over likely benefits for a few.
@AtticPhilosophy If we assume that humans are net producers then in what calculation would you let net producers die to work on an asteroid problem? It assumes that each action demands the same inputs but that obviously isn't true, we can do research on asteroids whilst saving those people
@Betweoxwitegan With finite resources, you have to pick where those resources go. Consequentialists theories say: pick the outcomes with the highest expected net benefit. I'm not saying that's right, just that that's what longtermists usually think. Have a look at the Greaves & MacAskill paper (free online) if you want to know what actual Longtermists say.
@AtticPhilosophy Will do, but finite resources doesn't mean that it's more efficient to put those resources into one major problem, there is a supply issue in everyone focussing on an asteroid problem for example it would actually be less efficient to do so, by all accounts it would be more efficient and thus better to save the people on the island whilst other skilled workers on the asteroid problem.
Like this analogy assumes that all variable capital (human labour) is equal which obviously isn't true, you can have finite resources but if there's inequality amongst those resources then it doesn't necessarily follow that all of the resources should be used as an input for one problem
biggest new ideas in *analytic* philosophy 😴
you nerds will never get laid if you don't join the revolution already.
i thought this entire video was ai generated
Mechanisms solving the combination problem will be found in the causality of mind in wholeness of purpose and contingency of sum of parts to complete and elegant solution!
Maybe, there's plenty of good people working on it.
Wow, if this is the most important stuff philosophy can offer, I guess philosophy is dead.
In a panpsychic context doesn't the quantum indeterminacy problem collapse? Why? Because with 'something like' consciousness or subjectivity present at every level it is not just the human observer who interacts with quantum events but the whole environment of the quantum event is populated by entities with an interest in the outcome. In this model the telos of the highest order systems would guide all.
I don't think so - a fundamental particle 'thinking' can't count as an observation/measurement of the system it's part of, else systems would never be in superposition.
@@AtticPhilosophy Indeed. It would not collapse itself, but, say, a chlorophyll molecule might 'register' the presence of a suitable photon in its vacinity and capture it into raising its own energy in a LUMO/HOMO transition (LUMO/HOMO nomenclature is inherently problematic, but you may be familiar with the phenmenon, which is straightforward enough). This also overcomes the interesting problem of the collapse of a 'probability field' into a locus many hundreds of times smaller than its own size. 'It' is recognized, and wanted, furthering the telos of the proto-conscious entity. PS Still not worked out how to reply to your last, but will get there eventually, regards, J.