president-elect augmented.marshall Profile picture
dad, professor animation & game art, AR/VR/MR technical director, conference producer, speaker, co-founder, (FLCL | great gatsby | steely dan | beep/bop/boop)
Apr 16 4 tweets 2 min read
"I’m not — because I think moral truths require a foundation beyond human opinion."

I do to. I am not basing anything on opinion.

I have clearly stated that morality is based on objective reality.

Evolution gives us a clue in moral intuition. This have developed over a billion years of life finding ways to survive.

Humans have added consciousness, reason, and logic. These can lead to preferences, but do not have to lead to preferences. This is where objective reality is important. "As for “God isn’t verifiable” — not everything real is scientifically testable. You can’t run a lab experiment on consciousness, logic, or moral truth either, yet you rely on them constantly. So that standard is inconsistent."

Everything real is testable. You can infer it, observe it, reason it. Why do you limit verifiable to *narrow* extent of scientific truth known as lab experiment. Thousands of field scientists, who have never done lab experiments, have established theories without a lab.

And, you can run a lab experiment on consciousness. We can detect thoughts and decisions in the human brain before you are consciously aware of them -- these are very deep structures in the human brain.

Moral truth can be tested in behavior -- how do people react? (Not how do they report thinking about reacting, though that is insightful, too.) It can also be tested by logic -- make sure that your premises are true, that you logic has consistent rules, then think it through.

Just because I have not exhaustively explained it to you in this limited medium doesn't mean it is inconsistent.

Perhaps there is some aspect you haven't considered or observed yet. There are at least a million threads here that we will not exhaust.

I do not rely on revelation.
I do not rely on negotiating ancient texts to make them relevant to my current situation. (I can understand them in context and perhaps see how they are beneficial in their own place and time.)
Oct 9, 2018 23 tweets 7 min read
TFW all you want is a robust, factual, data-driven debate with citations about an interesting topic, but all you get in reply are declarative statements, replies of "irrelevant!" on the *central* topic, but no data, and, of course, blocked!
ah, Twitter debates...time wasted... Rob Reiner stated that "The vast majority of our country is progressive. " & stated a case for "pure" representative democracy (ignoring Socrates and other tragedies of mob rule), lumping gerrymandering, voter suppressions in with the Electoral College!