'Objective Morality' in Earwa-what's yo favorite colour baby

  • 21 Replies
  • 9670 Views

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« on: April 24, 2013, 06:13:57 pm »
Quote from: Callan S.
Man, I argued this one with Kalbear for long enough at Westeros. Even Scott at the TPB said along the lines of 'You've gotta explain this objective morality thing to me'

And eventually I came up with an analogy which is fun in it's own respect.

What's your favorite colour?

Okay, so we have a book about a fictional world where, objectively, everyones favorite colour is blue (and dang does this example not work if your favorite colour is blue!).

So, uh, does your favorite colour change when you read the book?

I'm guessing no?

So are you a disruption to this world? A mind which does not concede to the principles of this world. How can blue objectively be the favorite colour of this world, when you turn your mind to it?

"Oh, but worlds can have segregated little 'favorite colour' fields around them"

So what, when you read you have to change your favourte colour when reading?

Let alone the idea of 'fields'?

Anyway: So it's objective. The author is insistant that the favorite colour in the fictional world is objectively blue.

Exactly how does that work out, when as the reader, your own favorite colour is not blue?

(except for some - perhaps Kalbear - who's favorite colour already matches the world? Or perhaps more accurately, who's favorite colour is 'externally dialable' - ie, something else can set it. Like a text?)

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #1 on: April 24, 2013, 06:14:03 pm »
Quote from: The Sharmat
Objective morality in this case is like objective reality. It's there but you don't have to like it. I fricking hate the limit on light speed myself, but there seems to be fuck all I can do about it.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #2 on: April 24, 2013, 06:14:10 pm »
Quote from: Callan S.
How is it there?

Is morality objective in RL for you? If it were, I'd still have many questions, but I could see the angle you're coming from.

But if not, particularly given these are books of fiction, how is the objective morality 'there'?

If not, why does it deserve the word 'morality' when it is not your morality any more than blue is not your favorite colour?

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #3 on: April 24, 2013, 06:14:17 pm »
Quote from: The Sharmat
I meant that we're assuming for the sake of argument that it is objective morality, otherwise we have no way of really talking. It's objective morality in Earwa to the extent that it's an actual measurable quantity. As to why "morality" is moral...why is "red" red?

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #4 on: April 24, 2013, 06:14:23 pm »
Quote from: Callan S.
Well, that's enacting the problem I'm describing : can you assume it is objective morality? Or more exactly my point/assertion is that you can not.

Go back to the favorite colour blue example - how can you assume it's it's objective that blue is the favorite colour in a fiction, when blue is not your favorite colour?

Were not talking physics here - like if a world has water that goes uphill, okay, fair enough.

Indeed as you say, maybe you don't like water going up hill.

But that's the thing, were not talking about the physics of that being objectively set, were talking about the 'like' of it being objectively set.

Or is morality not about what you like or dislike?

I'm not sure what it is...what remains, if you remove like and dislike from morality? Some sort of semanta-matter drifting somewhere?

IF you take it that morality is your likes and dislikes (even just to humour me), unless the book actually forces you somehow to like certain things*, how is this an objective like? An objective morality? Objectively the colour blue is your favorite colour because in the setting it's objectively everyones favorite colour? How so?

Anyway, if you take what I describe as having some basis, it's interesting to find a point where fiction can't actually go. Where fiction becomes mute.

* Curiously I do have a personal story about this.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #5 on: April 24, 2013, 06:14:35 pm »
Quote from: The Sharmat
The whole point of 'objective' morality is that your opinion is irrelevant. There are flat earthers in the real world, after all; but the shape of the Earth as an oblate spheroid is as objective as a thing can get.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #6 on: April 24, 2013, 06:14:40 pm »
Quote from: Callan S.
If you take it morality somehow exists as much as the shape of the earth exists, I guess so.

Otherwise, when morality doesn't exist like the shape of the earth exists, how exactly does my or your opinion not matter?

As I said, were not talking physics here. Are you actually taking a contrary position on that and saying we are talking physics? (it's fine if you do, I'm cool with that) You've drawn a comparison to the shape of the earth, which is physics based. Also a comparison to the speed of light, which is physics. But not out and out argued against my claim were not talking anything that is physical/physics based.

To me, either you have to explicitly say objective morality is a matter of physics/is physically existant, or you have to give up comparisons to the speed of light, or what shape the earth is. You can't say "you have to put up with it...yet this isn't really physics were talking about"

What qualities is morality supposed to have that makes it something you have to put up with as much as you put up with the shape of the earth or the effects of gravity?

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #7 on: April 24, 2013, 06:14:47 pm »
Quote from: lockesnow
maybe compare morality to time?

Time can be objective, generally is objective.  Time happens, right.  at least from our perspective.

It's possible that time could be subjective to a given observer who is not constrained by the limitations of current human existence.

Objective morality is like that.  Within Bakker's fictional world, morality [time] happens, but that morality [time] functions within a more constrained rule set than the rule set in place in the Earth Human experience.  The earth human experience may not even have a rule set, it may be an ungoverned or unmeasurable or uncontainable variable.  Who the hell cares, in Bakker's world he's isolated the variable and it plays under particular rule sets.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #8 on: April 24, 2013, 06:14:54 pm »
Quote from: Callan S.
Quote
It's possible that time could be subjective to a given observer
Subjective to who? The observer of time is subjective? Or time itself is subjective - if it's time, how can time be subjective? Like it has a mind and decides stuff?

If so, isn't that my point? This morality thing is the result of a mind. It's subjective.

Otherwise an observer seeing time as subjective doesn't say much - the passing of time is subjective to all of us. Try judging when two minutes has passed, without looking at a clock - that's one example I read somewhere recently.

Which did you mean, the observer is subjective or time itself is subjective?

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #9 on: April 24, 2013, 06:15:03 pm »
Quote from: dietl
The way I use these words `Objective morality` is nonsense. Morality is always subjective.

I don't see how Earwa has objective morality. I haven't read WLW yet so is there something I don't know (no big spoilers please)?

If this is about the whole damnation thing then, the way I see it, it has nothing to do with morality. It's more about how the world is built. The fact that using sorcery causes you to be damned/go to hell doesn't make sorcery 'bad'.
A religious person might not agree with me, but not committing a bad act only because you don't want to go to hell doesn't make you a good person, just as doing good things only to go to heaven doesn't. Fear of consequences is about rationality not morality.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #10 on: April 24, 2013, 06:15:09 pm »
Quote from: The Sharmat
If morality WERE objective, it would be a matter of physics. Though the relativity thing is a good point. Relativity can still be objective, ironically. It's not so much that time is subjective as that two different observers are viewing different time flows that are both objectively true. Which is hard to get the human mind around, but hey, the Universe doesn't have to cater to our feeble capabilities.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #11 on: April 24, 2013, 06:15:16 pm »
Quote from: dietl
Quote from: The Sharmat
If morality WERE objective, it would be a matter of physics.

Morality is about what people SHOULD do.
Physics in this context is about what people CAN do.
Saying morality is a matter of physics smells like an is-ought problem to me.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #12 on: April 24, 2013, 06:15:24 pm »
Quote from: Callan S.
Quote from: The Sharmat
If morality WERE objective, it would be a matter of physics. Though the relativity thing is a good point. Relativity can still be objective, ironically. It's not so much that time is subjective as that two different observers are viewing different time flows that are both objectively true. Which is hard to get the human mind around, but hey, the Universe doesn't have to cater to our feeble capabilities.
Well no, both observers are falling back on the notion that time always moves at the same rate, and then treating the rate of time they are within as THE rate of time. Those observations aren't objectively true. There aren't two objectively true yet incompatable events. Just two incompatable perspectives. Drawn from more 'center of the universe' intuitive thought.

That's my point - there isn't an 'objective' and another 'objective' for the fiction of an 'objective morality' to appeal to.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #13 on: April 24, 2013, 06:15:34 pm »
Quote from: lockesnow
Time is objective.   Our objective measures of time are inherently subjective.  And as relativity points out, there can be multiple valid experiences of time using the same units of measurement and getting a different result for each objective experience.  One month might equal one year and both are valid.

Now, imagine a multidimensional alien that doesn't experience time as objective, rather they perceive time to be as varied, subjective and manipulable as color. 

We three dimensional humans, stuck within the limitations of our world experience will always be stuck in the time is objective paradigm. 

But for an alien outside this paradigm, something we know to be objective is completely subjective.

That's what I mean.  within the Earwa paradigm, morality is completely different for those beings.    within the Earth paradigm, morality is ethereal rather than real.

From this perspective your histrionics over this issue boil down to: It is impossible for fiction to exist because the real world is real, and the realworld's realness means that fiction worlds can't exist because realness disproves something inherently fictitious and it is impossible for the fictitious to contradict the realness. 

the whole thing is needlessly convulted and silly.

What Came Before

  • *
  • Administrator
  • Emwama
  • *****
  • Posts: 0
    • View Profile
    • First Second Apocalypse
« Reply #14 on: April 24, 2013, 06:15:40 pm »
Quote from: Callan S.
Quote
histrionics
Googling this comes up describing a personality disorder. It seems an ad hominem, and A: Not polite - if for some reason my theory offends, say so. Or respect me as you would have yourself respected. And B: I guess not for everyone, but for some an argument that includes ad hominem simply undermines that argument.

I'll continue on the idea that either there was no intended ad hominem, or if it was intended, that it'll cease.

Quote
And as relativity points out, there can be multiple valid experiences of time using the same units of measurement and getting a different result for each objective experience.
They aren't an objective measurement of time, they are measurements of particular effects in particular situations. If I measure the length of a metal bridge during a hot day, and someone else measures it during the night of a cold winter, we both get a measurement and neither match. Neither is the objective length of the bridge overall. But there are not two 'objective' lengths to the bridge. It's simply a matter of not measuring the correct quality involved.

Quote
Now, imagine a multidimensional alien that doesn't experience time as objective, rather they perceive time to be as varied, subjective and manipulable as color.
As we manipulate colour? We don't subjectively control colour. We use physical movements to move various chemicals about. Even if the alien can slow time within a certain area so to the observer in it it seems a month has passed while to an observer outside that area it seems a year has passed. But this makes for two objectives, not. Time ends up like wind speed - the speed of wind changes in various locations. It's just our stubborn inclination to think time is unmoveable that makes it seem two objective observations are occuring. If two objectives are occuring, you just aren't measuring the correct quality involved.