Ten weird moral theories

March 19, 2021

1. Occamism: the simpler a moral theory is, the more likely it is to be true. Hence (a priori), the most probable two moral theories are that (a) everything is permissible or that (b) nothing is. 2. Majoritarianism: an action is morally right if and only if the majority of conscious beings capable of understanding that action and its consequences think it's right. 3. Restraintism: if you have the desire to do something, then you don't get moral credit for doing ...

The many forms of belief

October 11, 2020

What does it mean to believe? We often say things like "I believe..." and "they think that..." But what do we really mean by a "belief"? It's notoriously tricky to define. For starters, we sometimes think of beliefs in binaries (true vs. false) and other times in probabilities (a 90% chance of coming true). We sometimes would be willing to bet on our beliefs ("I'll bet you $100 that New York City is not the capital of New York State"), and other times we wouldn't be willing to bet (e.g...

Reimagining What You Think You Want

August 7, 2011

I tend to enjoy myself quite a lot when I swim. And yet, I would very rarely choose to swim when the opportunity was available. One might conclude from this that though I liked to swim, I didn't want to swim, so my "wanting" and "liking" were out of sync. But on further reflection, something more subtle was occurring. When I would try to decide whether I wanted to go for a swim, I would do so by performing a quick mental simulation of the experience. The problem was, that in the case of swimming...

Some Things Are Only In Your Simulation

July 28, 2011

It is impossible to perceive anything directly. What we experience as a visual image starts out as electromagnetic radiation of various frequencies which reflects off of an object and then hits our eye. The photoreceptor cells in our eye are stimulated, information propagates down the optic nerve, and so forth. We usually interpret this as seeing the object we are looking at. However, a more complete description involves acknowledging that we live in a simulation constructed by our brain. Our ey...