I’m a moral nihilist. I have no reason to believe that morality is anything other than preferences.

I have those preferences, of course — essentially it’s just intuitional leanings. Any need or desire to follow those leanings is purely for my own enjoyment. I decide what is right and wrong based on what I feel is right and wrong, and I follow them only because of a self-created obligation to myself. I demand that others follow the same “rules” I have for myself, because I want them to. It makes the world the way I want it to be.

The way I see it, every other system of morality is based on unjustifiable claims too, so why follow someone else’s invented ideas of right and wrong? I might as well pick the unsubstantiated claims that I like. I create my own meaning to life, because there isn’t one inherent. I create my own values, because there aren’t any inherent.

Less abstractly? I want good things to happen to good people, in appropriate proportion. I want bad things to happen to bad people, in appropriate proportion. Intentions are more important than consequences. Truth is valuable. Logic is valuable. Dignity is valuable.

So basically, I do want to talk about the whole incalculability deal. I don’t want to make it be some strong point — it doesn’t invalidate utilitarianism or consequentialism, and that wasn’t what I was trying to do. That said, I still find it to be an “issue”, which you may or may not agree with (more on that in a second). Regardless, despite what some people seem to be writing about me, that has never been the basis of my dismissal of utilitarianism. I purposely didn’t include a longer discussion of that because that would be getting into much broader ideas of morality, explaining my own ideas about morality, and would’ve strayed too far from the book. I’m reaaaaally regretting even throwing that slight bit in because that was kinda straying into exactly what I wanted to avoid, and not actually very interesting or useful. Derp.

Alright, so why do I think it’s an issue? I will admit that operating as utilitarians do is likely more useful than not working towards happiness, etc., at all, and even more likely more useful than actively working against it. Utilitarianism, carried to its absolute full implications, can probably, but not certainly increase pleasure/wellbeing/happiness in the world. Is it the best means by which to do so? I don’t know — there’s no way to know. There’s no way to know if any action is good or bad. You can only guess that it’s probably good/bad. You can guess that you’re probably making the world happier and healthier.

Is that the end of the world? No. But it’s extremely unsatisfying, at least to me — the idea of “hopefully trending towards happiness in the long run” sounds lame. Most of the time when I’m arguing about morality with folks, it’s on points of “Really? Does that sound right to you?”, because there’s no means by which you can disprove values that are chosen. All you can do is convince people. But really, the incalculability thing is one of the weaker points for that. I’m not really sure why I put that in. I guess I was just thinking about it the day I wrote the post. >.>

Also, Harris did mention something regarding that whole issue, that I just straight-up missed. I apologise for that. I either didn’t read things as closely as I ought to have or just forgot the things I read. I also found that I phrased things pretty poorly in a couple places in my post that could result in misunderstandings. Bah. I’ll try to be more careful in the future. :<

And due to popular demand (and by that I mean a couple people), in my next post, I’m going to do a vague glossing over of what I actually believe regarding morality.

**Things in quote marks + italics are direct Harris quotes, as well as block quotes, unless otherwise noted.**

I’m pretty late to the party, but since I see it brought up in so many atheist discussions of morality, I wanted to write out some of my thoughts on Sam Harris’ book, The Moral Landscape. I’m about to do a bunch of naysaying, but I want to first make clear a huge misconception that a lot of people have regarding The Moral Landscape, because there are people who are both claiming to agree with Harris and disagree with him who seemingly haven’t figured this out.

Harris is not saying that science tells us that we ought to maximise well-being. I don’t know if the subtitle “How Science Can Determine Human Values” was chosen by Harris or a publicist, but it seems to have misled an awful lot of people into thinking “Hurr, they have the Bible to tell them what is right and wrong, and now we have science to tell us what is right and wrong!” Really, a more appropriate subtitle would’ve been “How science can help us achieve the things we’ve already chosen to value”. Science is not the claimed origin of “good = maximising well-being”.

Onto the meat of the book!

Maximising well-being is good, and you ought to do so

Unfortunately, Harris does not support this — he just asserts it. If you were looking for a book to give your utilitarianism more justification, or a convincing argument in favour of it, you’ve picked the wrong book. You can walk into his book sharing this premise (or just decide to agree with it right away because that Sam Harris is so dreamy and hey, you do like making people happy) and enjoy all his preaching to the choir, or you can fundamentally disagree and find most of the book meaningless and boring as fuck. Disliking utilitarianism as I do, I fell into the latter camp. And unsurprisingly, Harris fails to even address the problem of calculability of consequences and the troubles most people find in not factoring in intentions into the morality of actions, but these are pretty standard problems with consequentialism, and I’ll only go into the former a little later on.

One of the common complaints I’ve seen thrown at Harris is that he’s breaking the is/ought distinction with his claim that you ought to maximise well-being. According to Harris, Hume’s is/ought distinction is “bad philosophy” and he addresses this common criticism in his book. Sean Carroll, who had written a response to Harris’ original TED talk, is who he addresses. Carroll says:

Attempts to derive ought from is are like attempts to reach an odd number by adding together even numbers. If someone claims that they’ve done it, you don’t have to check their math; you know that they’ve made a mistake.

I think this is excellently phrased. And it shouldn’t be any surprise that Carroll “elevates it to the status of mathematical truth”. The idea that you cannot have anything in your conclusion that was not mentioned in your premises (aside from logical connectives and quantifiers), is one of the core ideas of logic itself. Any argument that has nothing but “is” statements for premises cannot validly introduce an “ought” statement into its conclusion. If that is “bad philosophy”, then logic itself is “bad philosophy”.

Where I don’t agree with Carroll is that this criticism is applicable to Harris’ argument. Harris’ never actually tries to justify that we ought to increase well-being. His declaration is essentially just a foundational premise, and so he isn’t deriving an ought from an is. He’s poofing one from thin air. This with an additional premise like “Lollipops increase people’s well-being (according to science!)” lets you validly deduce that you ought to give lollipops to people. And that’s basically what Harris is calling for people to do.

But unfortunately, Harris decided to respond to this criticism in the most bafflingly stupid way — by saying that it’s a silly criticism since everything could fall under that criticism. That “Scientific ‘is’ statements rest on implicit ‘oughts’ all the way down.” Uh. Scientific “is” statements rest on implicit other “is” statements all the way down, and at some point is going to rest on unjustified “Logic is true” types of statements. But “ought”s? What the hell? Saying “Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen” does not implicitly assert that one ought to value empiricism. Part of the claim might implicitly rest on empiricism being true (that is, the sole source of knowledge is the senses), but this is just more “is” statements. Science does not deal in values, and there is an important distinction between moral values, and “This is important to me” values that scientists often employ to be useful and productive that are not core to the functioning of the scientific method. He makes a similar flub when he claims “there are no facts without values.”

… and if you disagree, you have nothing worthwhile to say.

try jus­ti­fy­ing tran­si­tiv­ity in log­ic: if A = B and B = C, then A = C. A skep­tic could say, “This is noth­ing more than an as­sump­tion that we’ve built in­to the def­ini­tion of ‘equal­ity.’ Oth­ers will be free to de­fine ‘equal­ity’ dif­fer­ent­ly.” Yes, they will. And we will be free to call them “im­be­ciles.”

Now, I agree with this. Sam Harris can call me an imbecile for my own “Good is defined as X” statements, just as I can call him an imbecile for his “Good is defined as that which increases the well-being of conscious beings” premise.

But nothing in this book makes a case for why he is less of an imbecile than I am. And that is why this book is uninteresting to anyone who disagrees with him. It brings next to nothing to the discussion. Those who claim other values are dismissed as making “no sense whatsoever“, or are “not worth listening to“.

Moral relativism is bullshit.

Hey, something I agree with him on! I was somewhat amazed that it took well into the discussion of relativism before Harris finally pointed out the contradiction in the stronger form of it and said “Relativists may say that moral truths exist only relative to a specific cultural framework—but this claim about the status of moral truth purports to be true across all possible frameworks.” It’s really the only argument you need, but of course Harris had to have a bunch of “OMG moral relativists defend throwing acid in girls’ faces!” before actual logic was thrown at it. It speaks rather poorly of his target audience.

At any rate, it surprised me how much time was dedicated to this. Is moral relativism really that common that it needed such a lengthy discussion? Harris has obviously had run-ins with these folks, and my experience with them has been solely with the anthropology folks, who are big on post-modernism and anti-colonialism, but I really haven’t seen this elsewhere, despite Harris’ claim that “it is by no means uncommon to find local eruptions of this view whenever scientists and other academics encounter moral diversity“. It certainly seems like the atheist/irreligious community doesn’t seem to hesitate to scream about the terrible, immoral things that are done in Islamic theocracies, or the Bible Belt. So this really rather seemed like audience-pandering.

Science can help maximise well-being.

Not really. Harris mentions neuroscience potentially being able to determine things that make people happy, and how much so. Science can also help us study what makes people healthy, which can also boost well-being. But the problem with this isn’t the science — it’s a problem with human predictive abilities and a problem with consequentialism.

Let’s say we decide to cure malaria. A doctor from Doctors Without Borders is relocated to a different city, since he no longer needs to work on malaria. Every single action he does there is because we decided to cure malaria. Curing it required hiring tons of lab technicians — which may have affected the employment status of some people, and caused now-available money to be spent in certain places. Curing malaria may have caused people to move to new cities, severing friendships, and forging new ones. It made people drive certain paths to work. And all of these actions had their own consequences, all of which can be traced back to curing malaria.

All of this is part of answering the question of “Was this action good or bad?” when you use utilitarianism. The net effect on the well-being of conscious beings includes every single ripple effect off it. We can predict some of the more apparent effects of our actions (no more people dying of malaria!), but there’s a vast web of effects that are completely hidden to us. It’s impossible to try to maximise well-being because it’s impossible to know what the full consequences of any attempts to do so are. There may be “good” and “bad” actions, but you’re completely in the dark as to which is which.

—

So, to summarise:

1. Utilitarianism is right, but not any more justifiable than anything else. But who cares what other people think, anyway?
2. Because utilitarianism is right, we don’t have to be loopy post-modernists.
3. Science can tell us what makes us happy. Here’s a smattering of scientific studies about the brain.

Why in the hell do they give out book deals so easily? This book isn’t about convincing others, or providing novel ideas. It’s about pandering to atheists with very little knowledge of philosophy and ethics and an abundance of arrogance, telling them science is with them, and then reiterating how immoral people who like FGM and throwing acid in girls’ faces are and how we don’t have to listen to them because We Are Right. This is nothing but a convoluted rehashing of utilitarianism that still falls to the same old criticisms, and an immense waste of time unless you really like a good ignorant circlejerk.

(Brief follow-up)

People get all up in arms about Ron Paul over his views of church and state, which appears to me to be the result of either misunderstanding his position, or misunderstanding what the separation of church and state is. He has been quoted as saying “The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution” — which, I will point out, was in the context of talking about liberals claiming to have constitutional support to ban Christmas decorations and people from saying “Merry Christmas”. It’s all manner of loony claims, but the statement about this “rigid” separation is one thing that he is actually… accurate on.

Ron Paul advocates separation of church and state only as far as the Constitution declares it (see my post about what the Constitution actually says, if you are confused). For example, the School Prayer Amendment that he co-sponsored shows exactly that:

Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to prohibit individual or group prayer in public schools or other public institutions. No person shall be required by the United States or by any State to participate in prayer. Neither the United States nor any State shall compose the words of any prayer to be said in public schools.

He does not support the government ordering that children in school pray to the Christian god, or even pray at all. He does support the right of students to pray, and the right of a principal to hop on the intercom and lead a prayer. To say that the principal can’t would be a conflict with “free exercise thereof”.

Additionally, his position on “under God” being in the pledge is that it isn’t a government issue. He says: “Local schools should determine for themselves whether or not students should say ‘under God’ in the pledge.” And since the establishment clause says “Congress shall make no law…”, this is all kosher as far as the Constitution goes.

Personally, I wouldn’t allow public schools or courthouses to do anything religious, due to the fact that they are funded by the government, but then I’m not a Constitutionalist, and I don’t claim legal precedence for my position.

Okay, so this kinda irritates me. I don’t know how common this misconception is, but I keep seeing it crop up here and there.

Some people claim that you can’t make gay marriage illegal, make abortions illegal, etc., because that’s religiously motivated, and by putting that into law, you are imposing your religion on people and that’s against “separation of church and state”. I’m afraid that’s not how it works.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

The religious clauses of the first amendment serve three purposes: The government may not set up a church (as England did), the government may not create laws that unfairly support one religion over another (for instance, taxing all religious institutional except the Christian ones, or Congress deciding to put crap about God on government currency), and the government may not prevent anyone from practising their religion.

Enacting legislature that lines up with the moral views of a religion (“Thou shall not murder”, anyone?) generally does not violate this. It does not favour that particular religious establishment, it does not say “you have to follow this religion” or “you can’t follow your religion”. On the other hand, we’d have some problems with “Thou shalt not have other gods before me”, but that’s not the sort of legislature we’re talking about here. A Christian who does not want gays to marry is not asking the government to force everyone to be Christian; they are asking the government to force gays to not to be allowed to marry. The Constitution allows for this.

Particularly if you’re The Atheist Experience. Or r/atheism.

Anyone who doesn’t bother to learn anything about philosophy (99% of the vocal atheist community), thinks solipsism is synonymous with thinking the entire world is a figment of your imagination. This is a particular rare type of solipsism that says that the only thing that exists is the self. It’s moronic and unjustified, but I doubt I need to point that out to you.

The basic stance of solipsism is that one cannot know anything outside one’s own mind. You know your thoughts and your feelings, you know that you exist. But you cannot know if the reason you are experiencing “seeing” your computer screen is because there’s actually a screen in front of you, or it’s goo in your brain-vat that’s inducing that sense. Any assertions regarding what exists outside the mind are unjustified.

This does *not* make it meaningless to talk about what you’re experiencing. It does not mean you should “stay home and mentally masturbate” any more than it means you should quit playing video games because it’s meaningless to even talk about them since they aren’t real.

Goddamn.

Ever since I graduated, I’ve been feeling like I haven’t been working towards any of my life goals. I got into the “OH GOD I’M FREEEE” mentality that primarily involved lots of video games, and then came the “oh god i’m a 9-5 wage slave”. Which isn’t to say I’ve been entirely wasting my time. My education was primarily theory, and this job has taught me a lot of the software development stuff I was lacking, and overall I’ve been given a lot of perspective on the entire industry. Definitely a positive gain.

But what I’ve been saying ever since college is that my real passion isn’t computer science (as fun as it is), it’s linguistics and languages. So here I am, not progressing at all in learning more about linguistics or even natural language processing, and getting rustier every day at Russian and Spanish. I’m not even reading “fun” books, and instead letting my attention span wither away in video games and refreshing reddit. I’m partially posting all this here for some sense of accountability.

I’m trying a regimen, starting out at an hour a day for now, cycling between: a textbook, a language, and an entertainment book. I’m picking each category one at a time, until I finish them. What I have so far…

Textbooks:

• Contemporary Linguistics – I read half of it in college, but will be starting over, to refresh.
• Speech and Language Processing – I adore this book. Used it for a class, but didn’t finish it.
• Natural Language Processing with Python – Hurr hurr, Python.
• Linguistic Fieldwork – This’ll be interesting. I haven’t studied this area whatsoever.

Languages:

• Russian – I’m focusing on Russian for the time being, until I’m fluent enough that it’ll be somewhat easy to maintain. Using Russian for Everybody at the moment, once I complete that, I have V Puti.
• Japanese – Genki. Maybe supplementing with some DS games for kanji.
• Hindi – I haven’t picked out any textbooks for this. It’ll be a ways down the road yet. This’ll be the slowest moving category anyways.

Entertainment:

• Timequake – I actually picked this out for book club this month. This list will change to prioritise book club things.
• Cold Mountain – Okay, I’m just a sucker for the movie.
• Middlesex – Been sitting on my shelf for ages. It won an award, so it’s gotta be good, right? Right?
• American Gods – I read a decent ways in a few years ago, but got busy.

So yeah, this is the plan. Which I chose to do right when Pokemon, Avadon, and Dragon Age 2 come out. Oh well, it’s good for me. Now to get myself back into running and weight lifting…

I wrote an n-gram generator in Java. I was going to just link it and say how to run it, but I’m guessing not very many people who read this dabble at all in natural language processing, so a brief explanation of concepts is in order.

What I mean by “n-gram” is an n-length subsequence from a text. In the sentence

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

we have the 2-grams (i.e. bi-grams):

• The artist
• artist is
• is the
• the creator
• creator of
• of beatiful
• beautiful things
• things .

You may notice that I treat punctuation as their own tokens (or “words”). Alternatively, they can be stripped, or just left with the word they’re next to. Depends what you’re trying to accomplish. Including them as tokens can be useful if you care about sentence boundaries or about the syntactical or semantic information they may provide you.

Using an n-gram model, we can probabilistically generate new sentences, based on a given source text (i.e. corpus) and a specified n. After parsing the corpus into n-grams (as above), we can assign a conditional probability to each word seen after that n-gram throughout the whole corpus. We might see “the artist is”, “the artist painted”, and then “the artist is” again, all within our corpus. We’ll now have:

Now, if we’re generating a new sentence, the starting word(s) are a bit of a toss up (I choose the first n words at random in my generator). But once we get going, we can use the last n words to come up with one to follow. The word “painted” should be chosen approximately 33.33% of the time if we’re using a bi-gram model and the last 2 words are “the artist”.

We’re not going to end up with very interesting new sentences if we’re only basing this on a couple source sentences (though there’s certain smoothing algorithms to compensate for a sparsity of data, but I won’t get into it). We’re also not going to end up with very interesting sentences if we use too high of an n. You don’t see “and then the dog went to the park but he got” very often, y’know? On the flip side, using too low of an n will result in nonsense. If we only predict using the last word, for instance, we probably will rarely end up with remotely grammatical sentences.

For an example, using bi-grams on The Picture of Dorian Grey can produce:

you need not be some curious Renaissance tapestries that performed the office of art one might fancy , her sign of approval .

And tri-grams:

the blood crept from its face , and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence .

So as I said, I wrote a program to do all this, given your choice of n and a corpus that you give it. You can download a zip file of it here. This includes:

• NGramGenerator.java – The actual Java class that I wrote. The constructor takes an int n, and a String containing the file path.
• doriangrey.txt – The Picture of Dorian Grey, by Oscar Wilde.
• prideprejudice.txt – Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen.
• grimm.txt – Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

If you want to play with it standalone, it does have a main method. Just specify n and the text file you want to use as the arguments at the command line. For the unenlightened, do something like:
javac NGramGenerator.java
java NGramGenerator 2 doriangrey.txt

It’ll just spit out sentences for you one at a time. You can tweak the code to do more at once if you’re that excited about it.

I’m publishing this under the FreeBSD license. Have fun.

I don’t call myself a feminist. When it comes to the simple definition of “believing women should possess equal rights,” I feel about as stupid calling myself a feminist as I would calling myself someone who believes blacks should have equal rights. Well, no shit. But I’m feeling a huge disconnect between my own beliefs and modern feminism. It seems like it’s morphing into a frenetic beast, striking blindly at every phantom it can find, leaving behind rational discourse and losing sight of the most important issues.

Think a woman bears some responsibility for her pregnancy in non-rape cases? Slut shamer. If you think it’s poor judgment to get trashed in an unsafe place around strangers? Victim blamer. Acknowledging certain negative stereotypes as often true? Misogynist.

Even excluding extremists like Dworkin, I feel that feminism has been blinded by zealotry into forsaking rationality. Logical arguments have been abandoned in favour of accusing the opposition of being misogynists.

Like I said, I don’t see a lot of use in this day and age in pointing out to people that I think men and women should be treated equally. I also don’t see vocal self-proclaimed feminists doing their cause very many favours.

—

Maybe slightly less dickish sounding?