[ExI] Striving for Objectivity Across Different Cultures

[Stefano Vaj]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 7:35 AM, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
> Yes, exactly! It's a fascinating project to imagine oneself cooped up
> with Adolf Hitler in a two person cell for many years. You could start with
> "hath not a Jew eyes" and go from there! Of course, as
> a collectivist there will probably remain insoluble differences in
> his outlook and values compared to yours. But they may be minimized.

I do not know whether that is ironic, but as a practising lawyer I
would say that actually a typical gimmick is to start from whatever
admission or stipulation may be possible to obtain.

A variant of the above approach is to play to the public, meaning that
your opponent may well deny you the very modest "common ground" that,
say, it is a good thing all other things being equal that knowledge be
expanded, but by doing so he corners you in a position much less
defensible than, say, the idea that genetic research should be
forbidden.

> What I also wonder about, along the same fantastical lines, is whether
> there would tend to be an irresistible drift of one's own opinions towards
> the views of someone else, provided that they continued to argue and
> think coherently. It's happening a tiny bit to me at work, I must confess,
> with someone who could not be more opposed to all our views here,
> an extremely religious individual who thinks that everything you and
> I and the people here believe to be "progress", he believes to be a
> decline. The Renaissance, for example, was a great step downwards.

No, I am not sure that argument in the long term makes you change your
ideas. It may. Or it may help you (and your opponent) to think what
you already think more radically and consistently. For instance, if he
does not like the Renaissance, and can show good cause for it from its
point of view, and I happen not to like the Renaissance either, if I
am really opposed to his values this obviously calls for a revision of
my previous opinion on the Renaissance.

Accordingly, for a neoluddite debating with a transhumanist is not
inevitably leading to its becoming a transhumanist, but at least is
leading to his hating us for the right reasons... :-)

> Yes, just as the "different reality" in which Neanderthals became dominant
> seems now not to be part of reality at all,

This is a good point, because at the end of the day even the most
rabid multiculturalist should admit that when people sharing a given
reality are totally extinct, such reality can hardly be said... to
exist, unless perhaps as a anthropological and historical subject of
study. :-)

> Yes, but aren't you speaking of XX positivism?  Sorry---you might be
> unfamiliar with the English term. It's used to mean the Vienna Circle
> evolved instrumentalist philosophy that rules out of bounds or
> meaningless anything that cannot be scientifically measured.

In fact, I am happy enough with the views of the Vienna Circle, Carnap
and all the family... :-)

> The XIX century scientific materialists are closer to us than many
> of the XX century philosophers. Not sure what you meant.

Certainly. I would say however that there was some degree of naive
scientism, or "impatient reductionism" as Dennet puts it, in the view
that everything, including, say, ethics, could quickly be decided by a
little measuring and experimenting and that the world was just a nice,
complicate clockwork mechanism.

Stefano Vaj