Walden Pod

I'm joined by Matthew Adelstein of Deliberation Under Ideal Conditions for Utilitarianism 101. We also talk about a few basic things everyone needs to know to be conversant in moral philosophy. 

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Wild animal suffering – is it possible to do anything about it? Should we do anything about it? Even though the general principles that inform our concern for animal welfare shouldn’t be arbitrarily limited to animals outside the wild, I think intervention on any serious scale would be ill-advised. The natural order is deeply interconnected, dynamic, and awesomely complex. Drastic action, such as ending predation, would plausibly cause the system to collapse into nonexistence or end in some other irreversible catastrophe. Sadly, natural evil is inextricably built into the biological order.

“...for practical purposes I am fairly sure, judging from man’s past record of attempts to mold nature to his own aims, that we would be more likely to increase the net amount of animal suffering if we interfered with wildlife, than to decrease it.” - Peter Singer

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Personal identity, the potential evolutionary origins of religion, Bernardo Kastrup and analytic idealism, the Ship of Theseus and substance dualism.

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A few thoughts on what mysterianism is not. Also, why "What is consciousness?" is a bad question. 

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My opinionated introduction to mysterianism. Inspired by Noam Chomsky, Colin McGinn, and Eric Schwitzgebel, we explore a version of mysterianism that I think may be true.

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Shane Wagoner - From Physicalism to Mysterianism

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A few scattered thoughts about internet materialists, stronger forms of physicalism, underdetermination, neuroscience, the evolution of consciousness, qualia microscopes, and the hard problem of consciousness.

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If epiphenomenalism is true, mental causation is an illusion. Even if pain and pleasure were inverted, you’d go on behaving the same way you do now, since your conscious states have nothing to do with determining or motivating your physical behavior. This is counterintuitive, to say the least. But it also leaves us completely unable to explain why our conscious states line up appropriately with our actions. We typically think that natural selection molded our mental profile: that which aids in survival and reproduction is incentivized by experiences with a positive hedonic valence, and vice versa. Thus, we have an evolutionary explanation of harmonious correlations. But on epiphenomenalism, this can't be the right explanation, since experiences play no causal role at all. If they have no causal influence, they can't make any difference to genetic fitness. So how is it that harmonious correlations evolved if experiences are invisible to natural selection?

Argument from Psychophysical Harmony w/ Dustin Crummett 

Psychophysical Harmony in a Nutshell  

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Music by ichika Nito and used with permission.

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Ben Burgis recently invited me on his Callin show to speak about the value of “science fiction” thought experiments in applied ethics.  I argue that in the realm of applied ethics, thought experiments often confuse more than they clarify. They don’t map on to the real world cases they’re intended to help with (for various reasons), and we shouldn’t be informing action with scenarios that differ in ethically relevant respects.
Applied ethics is about what we should do – it’s a uniquely practical subfield of philosophy. Ethical thought experiments commonly provide us with both too much and too little information: they exclude morally relevant detail that we would possess in the real world, and they include morally relevant detail that we would not possess in the real world. So even though we may come to the same conclusion regarding an action or principle in a thought experiment doesn’t mean we’d agree in the real world case, since these two cases differ in morally relevant respects. Consequently, I think it’s often a mistake to inform action in the real world with conclusions drawn from a thought experiment.
Ben Burgis - The Joe Rogan Experience 
Canceling Comedians While the World Burns
The Left Should Oppose Censorship by Big Tech Companies
Callin - Friendly Debate w/Emerson Green—Do “Science Fiction” Thought Experiments Have Any Value in Philosophy?
James Wilson - Philosophy Bites Interview on the value of thought experiments in applied ethics

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