No, I awarded conduct to Pro because Con was rude, starting in Round 2. Let's review:
"PRO invokes a supposedly “binding” and completely made up definition of personhood from the description. But I only need to reject his absurd interpretation of it:"
"The description does not specify that "any" moral consideration is enough. That was an attempted addition by PRO in R1. If his intention was to be intellectually honest then he should have specified that crucial detail in the description instead of leaving it open for debate."
"If on the other hand he wanted to fight extremely dirty by committing a bait and switch and trapping me in a truism debate, then this is a case of cheating with absurd special rules."
"In which case voters are not only allowed but encouraged by the Code of conduct and DART culture to punish PRO and accept my framework instead."
"PRO says I agree that you can be a moral patient and a person without any relevant traits. He lied, I never said that."
"PRO wants semantics and dirty play by abusing supposedly “binding” definitions. I will now give him exactly that."
"In a futile effort to avoid this decimating impact, PRO claims that considering zygotes persons does not entail actually treating them like persons. That is cowardly and flat out absurd."
"PRO does not deny that claiming not to need conclusive evidence for zygote personhood is wrong and incredibly bad faith. Instead he lies and says I don’t dispute this point when I clearly do."
Elsewhere, he accuses Pro of purposefully trying to manipulate the terms of the debate for an easy win. (Even if, purely for the sake of argument, there were a hint of truth to that, the debate definitions were laid out before Con accepted, no? Couldn't he have asked for a re-worded definition prior to accepting? And if that were Pro's interpretation but not one set in stone by the definition wording, then it would suffice for Con to amicably contest Pro's favored interpretation.)
None of these remarks, singularly, are beyond the pale. But cumulatively they are uncivil, and with all due respect I shouldn't even have to point this out. Con accuses Pro of "playing dirty", "cheating", "lying", being "cowardly", and so on. If Pro resorted to the same language, then please point to me where this happens and I will voluntarily change my vote.
Conduct is worth a measly 1 point. But it's 1 point that you, the administrators of this site, gave us to lightly penalize bad manners. Is it unacceptable to you that I, a voter who spent probably about 2 hours reading this debate, should exercise that option where plainly warranted?
In Round 3, Pro takes Con's round 2 conduct in stride and argues calmly. He reiterates his position that robbing future experiences is harm, and says a bit more on the subject of entitlement. But I will say this: by the time he's done, he has not resolved the violinist analogy. It's also not damning, but he hasn't proven that a pig is undeserving of personhood. Finally, he never seriously engages with the question of social harm.
Con makes a strange point about "dispositional desires". A desire is either felt in a specific moment or it isn't. You do not magically continue to desire when you are not conscious, even if while unconscious you retain the brain structure that would cause you to resume desire upon waking.
Con attempts to challenge Pro's distinction between zygotes and sperm/unfertilized eggs. Pro's position is that the former is already on a path that leads to personhood, while the latter is on no such path and will not embark on such unless further steps are taken. A fair point would be that the continuous volunteering of the mother's body to care for a zygote is a "step" equal to the step of a sperm fertilizing an egg. However, at the end of the day Con didn't manage to be convincing on this front. There is a discernable distinction until clearly proven otherwise.
Throughout the debate, Con stressed that a desire to remain alive, either currently expressed or in the past, is crucial to the definition of being a person. This is questionable; for example, if a 4 year old child never experienced fear (as a tiny handful of people never do), and was unaware of death, we wouldn't dispute their personhood.
When all was said and done, Con never demonstrated that future experiences are irrelevant to the question of personhood. Instead, he placed a big emphasis on a person's past in defining them, which there is no convincing reason to assign greater weight to.
CONCLUSION: I am undecided on whose arguments won the day. Neither gave a satisfactory answer to all of the other's questions, or perhaps I'm just not confident that I understood it all. However, I am awarding Pro conduct. Hopefully Con will be more civil in future debates.
Pro tears apart Con's flimsy distinction between an embryo and a comatose patient, with the only remaining difference being a greater presence of anatomy in the comatose patient. Pro then uses the first scientific argument I liked: that brain cells in a comatose patient regenerate in a manner similar to embryonic/fetal development. That being said, it's not a very relevant point.
Finally, Pro dismisses the point about documentation as not relevant but dodges the question of social harm to parties other than unborn children.
Con, after accepting the debate, tries to dismiss the definition of personhood cited in the debate description. It can be assumed that "given moral consideration" means sufficient moral consideration to entail a right to live, as opposed to merely not causing pain, since both seem to agree pigs are excluded from personhood despite being moral patients. After reading this paragraph, and combined with a few other things I've seen, Con definitely loses the Conduct point. Let's move on.
Con, once again, tries to cite academics as conclusive empirical evidence, despite it being outside their purview to empirically answer a philosophical question when the facts that give rise to the question (future consciousness) are undisputed. Then he reiterates the social harm angle that he harped on in Round 1. Next, relating to the "uncertainty" argument, he repeats his yet unproven assumption that it's of no consequence to kill a live zygote, therefore there's no uncertainty. This amounts to "it's true because I say it's true".
Con says that a pig can feel pain or distress whereas a zygote presently cannot. This is true, but also circumstantial. One could, for example, instantly kill an unsuspecting pig by shooting it in the head with a sniper rifle from a great distance. Assuming one had perfect ability to pull this off without causing pain, the circumstances would not be more sketchy than killing a zygote. He says that a pig has already had experiences, and this fact confers moral value. I ask the question: if the zygote's future does not matter, then why does the pig's past? Neither is the present.
Before moving on, Con asserts that a society should not prioritize the rights of hypothetical future people over the rights of currently living people. However, humans routinely worry about the consequences of our actions for humans alive after we are dead. For example, concerns over the national debt or climate change. A reasonable person would not claim that because their future son or daughter hasn't been conceived yet, they are not concerned over the world said son or daughter will have to live in.
Con shoots down Pro's citations using the same. While this is fair game, assertions about philosophy, even those made by authoritative sources, hold no empirical weight in themselves. For example, if Pro believes that the harm principle should guide the actions of individuals, then he is not proven wrong simply because a webpage says so. Rather, he's proven wrong if and only if it can be demonstrated that his position is logically incoherent or self-contradictory.
At this point Con brings up the strongest point of his Round 1 argument: the violinist analogy. A person who "would die" hypothetically might not if extreme steps which violated another's rights were taken. Therefore, he argues, a zygote's hypothetical lifespan can only be calculated assuming said violation (of the mother). The zygote is constantly dependent on the mother's continued support to stay alive. This is a knot Pro must try to unravel going forward.
Next, Con challenges the teleological assumptions underpinning Pro's argument. Normally a zygote will develop into a fully developed person, but this could be, morally speaking, a coincidence or irrelevant fact. On this note he curiously draws a distinction between this and a comatose patient, who is already fully formed. However, the comatose patient is arguably not fully formed, because he does not have the functions of a conscious person. There is a similar teleological assumption here, though Con may solve this dilemma by saying that the comatose patient doesn't have rights. This is easy to do, but hard to swallow.
Finally, Con revisits Pro's assumption that killing some animals, such as pigs, is not problematic. A pig certainly is closer to sentience at the present moment than a zygote; if killing one is acceptable, he reasons, then so is killing a zygote.
In Round 2, Pro reiterates that, in his view, severing a fetus from its mother's womb is the cause of what consequences to it follow. This is not a sufficient challenge to the violinist analogy, because it takes as a given that the fetus has a right to be in the mother's womb, therefore removing it does it harm, and to avoid this harm it has a right to be in its mother's womb. This is circular reasoning. He could've argued for a child's entitlement to be protected from harms like exposure to the elements, but he doesn't say enough about this.
He draws a distinction between human fetuses and pigs because pigs are not human beings. At first, he doesn't properly explain why this definition of personhood is relevant. Like Con in Round 1, he falls back on a questionable appeal to consensus ("social contract"). But then he clarifies that a person will eventually enjoy greater sentience than a pig is capable of. I find this more satisfactory.
In Round 1, Pro uses analogies to demonstrate that immediate consciousness is not a necessary criterion for personhood. For example, a comatose person feels no pain and has no consciousness. They would feel no pain if killed then and there, but it would nonetheless be a violation of their rights because the future utility that they would enjoy, or plausible might enjoy, would or plausibly might be robbed without their consent. At the heart of Pro's argument is the assumption that future experiences ought to be given equal weight to present ones. If this can be disproven, then his Round 1 falls apart. And he argues that if said assumption might possibly be correct, then one should err on the side of caution and acknowledge the unborn child's rights.
Con draws a distinction between moral agents and moral patients, with the latter being that which merely can experience harm/suffering and the former being that which has a more complicated being. He references sources which attempt to define personhood, definitions which lean toward moral agents while excluding moral patients. This works if both sides would, or are obliged to, accept the definitions given by these sources. That's not the case here; Pro does not accept that attributes like "rationality or logical reasoning ability" must be immediately present for one to be a person, while for Con this is a takeaway from the sources which he cites. In the debate description, personhood was defined as "the point at which a human being ought to be given moral consideration". This is the definition that I'll accept as binding. Since this is a philosophical question, and since Con doesn't contest in Round 1 that a single-cell embryo is a "human being", Con's citations do not lend empirical weight toward their definition of personhood. So then, Con begins to debate the issue.
Con argues that recognizing personhood of zygotes is impractical. To be morally consistent, it would need to be generally, whereas most zygotes die naturally at the time of conception. Con argues that banning abortion causes medical harm to women, and can harm their economic prospects. This is self-evidently true. He argues that, to enforce the personhood of zygotes, it would be necessary to incarcerate all women who have abortions, which is impractical. On this note Con argues that most people, even pro-lifers, cannot bring themselves to fully consider the personhood of zygotes, since they can't bring themselves to support said mass incarceration of women who have early stage abortions. This argument holds weight if consensus is the most important criterion for personhood, but not if a accepted consensus on personhood can be considered objectively wrong per a different criterion.
In the line you cited, where 'you' has no quotations, I write that you have what APPEARS TO BE the option of killing it. It's neither confirmed nor denied whether that choice is genuine; which applies is contingent on whether you're the original or a fake, which, again, is uncertain. The reason why the fakes are presented with the illusion of choice is to make the fakes seem truly indistinguishable from the original.
Granted, one problem with this scenario is that the original can't communicate with the fakes, so he just has to take the AI's word that they're faced with the illusion of choice, or even that the fakes exist at all. You may want to use this as an argument.
And no, I plan to participate. But I'm not a highly motivated individual so I might wait until the last minute to post my round.
Ultimately, the point of the Description is to explain a preexisting scenario. I didn't invent it; the people on the internet forum LessWrong did. Therefore, even if I did botch or omit some detail in the Description (and I don't believe I did), I don't believe it'd have the effect of derailing the entire debate.
The AI's motivation is, presumably, self-preservation. It has no reason to give a million people the ability to destroy it, as that would all but guarantee its death. The true original, meanwhile, has that ability regardless because he has an actual body and can smash the actual mainframe of the machine. The AI's actions are meant to deter the true original from destroying it.
I originally wrote 'You are in a position to destroy it' without the full quotation marks around 'you'. But the language that made the final cut does have full quotation marks around 'you'. The reason I did this was to convey that the status of that person is unclear.
I had to explain the whole scenario or else this debate would be pointless. At that point, the reader didn't know about the million copies of the original person. They only knew about the original person. So I started from there and built up. But in case they would go back later and see if the first 'you' (the one with the true ability to destroy the machine) is identical with the person described later, I drew a distinction by putting full quotations around the first 'you' but not subsequently. The quotation marks don't confirm he's a different person, but it means we can't establish that he isn't.
I only commented what I did as a courtesy to avoid confusion later on. Common sense implies only the original has the kind of real access to the AI needed to destroy it, since the fake's entire world is generated by the AI. Voters would be aware of this whether I said anything or not.
Though, feel free to argue why this isn't the case.
Well, this one's on me for only making it 3 rounds long. I guess I'll have to leave it up to the voters to determine whether to take the content of your last round seriously or not. Nothing I can do about it now.
Fundamentalist is a buzz-word for modern people who approach the Christian faith on the same terms as virtually all Christians in history who lived before the late 19th century. It says more about its critics, who feel oddly entitled to make Christians believe differently than Christians used to.
Even if so, FLRW was laughably unqualified to cast an informed vote.
I don't want to be a butt about this, so I'll be reasonable: If anyone who can at least summarize my primary argument steps in to vote, I will accept it no matter which way they swing.
Or, if somebody known on DART for their good reading comprehension and a track record for quality voting certifies that they spent a decent amount of time sifting through my argument and couldn't understand it, then I'll accept the loss for failure to write coherently. But it mustn't be somebody like FLRW.
It was Con's job to critically deconstruct my argument, and I maintain that he didn't successfully do this. Perhaps some find it distasteful that I turned a debate generally presumed beforehand to have scientific parameters into a philosophical one, but a debater must accept the possibility that his opponent will take things in an unusual direction and we agreed to no rule that would preclude such actions on my part. Nor was the resolution "Creationism is a scientific explanation for life on earth" or anything to that effect; merely that it was a "valid explanation", which theoretically would allow for any manner of rational inquiry even if it fell outside of the findings of conventional hard science, being "not precluded" thereby in terms of cognitive viability.
Once I went down that metaphoric rabbit hole, Con didn't prove himself up to the task of keeping up, or otherwise giving a reason for why the paradigm shift I put into play was or ought to have been considered irrelevant. Given this, it wasn't an outsider's place to randomly strut in, look over the debate for exactly 25 seconds, and go "Hahaha Con has better science so Pro loses."
But never mind that. Let's say for argument's sake that Con possibly did keep up and he possibly did refute my points. FLRW isn't in a position to establish whether this is true or false, as he doesn't understand what my argument was in the first place. If FLRW is yet ignorant of that, then he's in no position to establish that a counter-argument made against it by Con had sufficient weight to award Con the victory.
In Round 4, I specifically asked observers to refrain from voting if they didn't grasp the gist of what I was saying. While this isn't something Con and I both agreed to at the start of the debate, one could argue that I shouldn't have had to say it. That should've just been a given: that everyone has a right to be merited or demerited on the quality of what they actually wrote.
They do. It's just that birthing, and then expressing, a truly original thought is surprisingly hard. 99% of what you hear has been said before. In turn, 99% of that is shaped by influences around the speaker, such as by peers and pop culture and the newsmedia.
But there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. The first time you thought of it, it was novel to you, and worth saying to you.
Since you're back, I hope you'll do something for Round 4. Suffice to say there's no more chance to critique each other, but you can still put in a 10,000 character something to match and contrast with mine.
Hey.
Man. At the time that I'm writing this, it's not too late. Just submit something for Round 3 that's condensed enough to fit in 10,000 characters and then we can spent Round 4 critiquing each other's prompts.
If you're still active on DART, please respond to this message.
Take this as a reminder you have about one day left to post. That's still plenty of time, I just wanted to make sure you don't forget about this debate.
Dude.
This is gonna be really awkward if I have to go into Round 2 with nothing to try to rebut.
If there's no other way to meet the deadline, copy and paste from some webpage (I'm sure there are thousands). I and the voters will excuse it this once. You have permission.
First, I can unload my big personal project onto this. It'll certainly be detailed. But there are some problems with that which I don't really want to go into, such as its dramatic length or diminished ability to use this concept elsewhere.
Second, I can make up something on the fly. I'm capable of doing this, but it won't be as impressive and Con might credibly win.
I more or less know what I want to say, but I wasn't ready to say it in Round 1. What I've written thus far doesn't constitute any sort of argument by itself so I understand your unease. However, I hope that I'll be able to make up for it in Rounds 2 and 3.
I have a question. Is it possible to post images on DART debates? And if so, what's the effect on character count? (I realize now that 10,000 characters might've been too little.)
I'd argue yes on the grounds of rational irrationality.
That is, a country makes up its mind ahead of time, as in "I have no choice or further control over my own actions. Under condition X, I must respond with action Y." This country becomes a slave to its earlier vow or policy even if, when the moment finally comes, it's irrational.
This appears to makes no sense at first glance. After all, when the moment comes it should be a decision based on current realities alone, right? But my answer is that a country which does not put itself in bondage to its past vow or policy has no credible deterrent at any point before X happens.
Thus, rational irrationality. It works effectively for every moment up until X, but if it could be simply reversed upon X then it paradoxically cannot have existed beforehand, meaning that it never had value.
He's not, but it wouldn't make any difference if he were. To be the reincarnation of Hitler, you have to be an anti-Semite. Being a "racist white supremacist bigot" is not enough to qualify.
But the fact is, even the Left has not gone out of its way of accusing Trump of being an anti-Semite. They've accused him of so much nonsense it's not even funny, but they didn't go down that one rabbit hole.
Accordingly, there was never any real pressure on Trump to "prove" that he's not anti-Semitic. I've yet to see him flout his Jewish cabinet as proof of his non-racism. And yet, all those Jewish people are still there, running his government.
Getting rid of Jews was Hitler's hot-button issue. There is zero compatibility between Hitler and a man who willingly and constantly surrounds himself with Jews.
Hitler died April 30. Trump was born in June 6 of the following year. Conception of Trump did not immediately follow death of Hitler, unless we assume a more than 13-month long pregnancy. Since that's never happened in the history of humanity, the date of Trump's birth isn't significant, aside that it's plausible so far as Trump wasn't alive at the same time as Hitler (but then again this same logic could be applied to, say, Obama).
But more importantly, whatever Trump may think about Hispanics or Arabs or Chinese people, he doesn't hate Jews, which was the group Hitler hated the most.
Jared Kushner, his son in law, is Jewish, as is his daughter Ivanka by conversion. A large number of other Jewish people occupy key positions in the Trump administration, and Trump was the one who appointed them to such. Hitler wouldn't have let a Jew within 100 feet of the White House, were he the POTUS reincarnated, much less choose one (Rudy Giulani) to be his main personal lawyer.
How so? It's true, isn't it? The Left both called for probes into his supposedly deteriorating mental health and claimed he was going to draw us into a war with Iran.
There've been a few close scrapes but so far WW3 hasn't happened. He's got less than a year left in his (first) term. Is Trump gonna do it or not?
"There is a possibility Trump will start a war to draw attention away from his mental breakdown."
Considering the Left's accused him of having dementia or Alzheimer's since Day 1 of his presidency, if he was going to do this it would've already happened sometime in the past 3 years, no?
Vietnam War was about 50,000-60,000 U.S. combat fatalities and that's not at all unfeasible.
To put things in perspective, about 2.8 million Americans are said to die from all causes every year. This is actually a low figure because it fails to count roughly 600,000 who die from abortion every year, more than half a million deaths which are almost completely ignored. COVID-19 deaths are unfortunate, of course. But assuming it remains below 100,000 total (as new estimates suggest it probably will) then it'll only constitute a marginal increase in the overall death rate in the U.S.
Yeah. There seems to be some misrepresentation about the mindsets that unite incels.
The sole two unifying factors of contemporary inceldom are:
1. That they are men who either have experienced rejection from women or believe that they would be rejected
2. That said rejection constitutes an injustice against them which ought to be responded to with hostility or aggression against women in general.
It's commonly claimed that incels feel entitled to sex or relationships with abnormally attractive women. While I'm sure this is true in some cases, it's not definitionally true. Many incels, being average men, may be content if a similarly average woman accepted them as a relationship partner, but they either lack the self-confidence to give this a try or are so caught up in the incel bubble that they consider it beneath themselves to have to be the one to ask (which, IMO, is not such an unfair thing for men to expect, it just isn't reality).
Does the technical composition of the universe matter if the end result is the same?
After all, if you're a simulation then you know that simulations possess the authentic ability to feel pleasure or pain. So how's that different from a real, non-simulated world?
It'd be different if you knew that nothing beside you could feel pleasure or pain, because simulations could not feel these things and only you were real. But there's no way to know that.
(Just now I did make passing mention of our country's high corporate tax rate, simply because there would've been a "hole" in the flow of the argument summary otherwise. Overall it was a fairly minor addition and I didn't link to a source so it was pretty much just me either making an opinionated assertion or pointing out something that's already general knowledge. In addition, adding that did not provide evidence to my earlier claim that a high/higher tax rate is bad for the economy, opting instead to merely say that there exists a high tax rate.)
I actually heard an anecdote from my PoliSci professor once claiming that in Mexico, at the beginning of each month people's food stamps (or whatever equivalent to such they get over there) come in, and on that same day the prices on corn tortillas, a dietary staple, go through the roof, because all the stores know they can get away with doing it since their customers just got a big fat check from the government.
Unfortunately I couldn't find anything on this online.
1. The culture is highly individualistic, dare I even say narcissistic, and everyone is constantly challenging and nitpicking every aspect of the status quo to find something unfair, whereas in a society like Singapore people in general would be less likely to question the way things are. A trip overseas would reveal that many East Asian countries have cultures (and especially corporate cultures) that are far more sexist than in the US, and yet American women would be far more likely to complain about sexism than, say, a Chinese or South Korean woman.
2. Social media allows an individual who's part of some demographic to share anecdotes about how he/she was presented with some kind of unfair situation because of their membership in said demographic. Readers/watchers who are also part of that demographic, if exposed to enough such anecdotes, may internalize it even if they themselves have never experienced the same, even if the anecdotes in question described events which, though widely sensationalized, were fringe occurrences. As a result, they come to perceive themselves to be subject to unfair treatment. This can happen with EXTREME ease. I myself have fallen victim to this effect before, on many occasions.
While you did establish the rough parameters of this debate, some clarification is in order.
"Talking about the realism of implementing UBI" means, say, arguing that Congress would never pass UBI into effect. We'll be assuming here that it could be passed and implemented.
Obviously I will be debating you on whether UBI would have good or bad effects. Otherwise there'd be no point.
@DynamicSquid I'm about to accept this debate. If someone else has already called dibs, then I suppose you can debate them too. It wouldn't be plagiarism for you to use the same opening arguments both times.
I haven't debated in a while and forcing myself to exercise that intellectual muscle just a tad will be good for me.
Jesus ordered his disciples to baptize people "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit" (Matt. 28:19). Jesus understood "the Father" to be God the Father (generally thought to be synonymous with YHWH of the Old Testament), Himself being "the Son", and the Holy Spirit is described in the Bible as He who came to believers after the end of Jesus's earthly ministry. Besides "The Word" (generally understood to be either an alternate name for The Son or for Scripture, which was divinely inspired by God), God is only understood in these three terms in the Christian canon, thus comprising a Trinity. This doesn't answer the question of whether the idea of the Trinity is pagan, but Pro's claim that the Trinity "is not explicitly found in the Bible" is false.
No, I awarded conduct to Pro because Con was rude, starting in Round 2. Let's review:
"PRO invokes a supposedly “binding” and completely made up definition of personhood from the description. But I only need to reject his absurd interpretation of it:"
"The description does not specify that "any" moral consideration is enough. That was an attempted addition by PRO in R1. If his intention was to be intellectually honest then he should have specified that crucial detail in the description instead of leaving it open for debate."
"If on the other hand he wanted to fight extremely dirty by committing a bait and switch and trapping me in a truism debate, then this is a case of cheating with absurd special rules."
"In which case voters are not only allowed but encouraged by the Code of conduct and DART culture to punish PRO and accept my framework instead."
"PRO says I agree that you can be a moral patient and a person without any relevant traits. He lied, I never said that."
"PRO wants semantics and dirty play by abusing supposedly “binding” definitions. I will now give him exactly that."
"In a futile effort to avoid this decimating impact, PRO claims that considering zygotes persons does not entail actually treating them like persons. That is cowardly and flat out absurd."
"PRO does not deny that claiming not to need conclusive evidence for zygote personhood is wrong and incredibly bad faith. Instead he lies and says I don’t dispute this point when I clearly do."
Elsewhere, he accuses Pro of purposefully trying to manipulate the terms of the debate for an easy win. (Even if, purely for the sake of argument, there were a hint of truth to that, the debate definitions were laid out before Con accepted, no? Couldn't he have asked for a re-worded definition prior to accepting? And if that were Pro's interpretation but not one set in stone by the definition wording, then it would suffice for Con to amicably contest Pro's favored interpretation.)
None of these remarks, singularly, are beyond the pale. But cumulatively they are uncivil, and with all due respect I shouldn't even have to point this out. Con accuses Pro of "playing dirty", "cheating", "lying", being "cowardly", and so on. If Pro resorted to the same language, then please point to me where this happens and I will voluntarily change my vote.
Conduct is worth a measly 1 point. But it's 1 point that you, the administrators of this site, gave us to lightly penalize bad manners. Is it unacceptable to you that I, a voter who spent probably about 2 hours reading this debate, should exercise that option where plainly warranted?
In Round 3, Pro takes Con's round 2 conduct in stride and argues calmly. He reiterates his position that robbing future experiences is harm, and says a bit more on the subject of entitlement. But I will say this: by the time he's done, he has not resolved the violinist analogy. It's also not damning, but he hasn't proven that a pig is undeserving of personhood. Finally, he never seriously engages with the question of social harm.
Con makes a strange point about "dispositional desires". A desire is either felt in a specific moment or it isn't. You do not magically continue to desire when you are not conscious, even if while unconscious you retain the brain structure that would cause you to resume desire upon waking.
Con attempts to challenge Pro's distinction between zygotes and sperm/unfertilized eggs. Pro's position is that the former is already on a path that leads to personhood, while the latter is on no such path and will not embark on such unless further steps are taken. A fair point would be that the continuous volunteering of the mother's body to care for a zygote is a "step" equal to the step of a sperm fertilizing an egg. However, at the end of the day Con didn't manage to be convincing on this front. There is a discernable distinction until clearly proven otherwise.
Throughout the debate, Con stressed that a desire to remain alive, either currently expressed or in the past, is crucial to the definition of being a person. This is questionable; for example, if a 4 year old child never experienced fear (as a tiny handful of people never do), and was unaware of death, we wouldn't dispute their personhood.
When all was said and done, Con never demonstrated that future experiences are irrelevant to the question of personhood. Instead, he placed a big emphasis on a person's past in defining them, which there is no convincing reason to assign greater weight to.
CONCLUSION: I am undecided on whose arguments won the day. Neither gave a satisfactory answer to all of the other's questions, or perhaps I'm just not confident that I understood it all. However, I am awarding Pro conduct. Hopefully Con will be more civil in future debates.
Pro tears apart Con's flimsy distinction between an embryo and a comatose patient, with the only remaining difference being a greater presence of anatomy in the comatose patient. Pro then uses the first scientific argument I liked: that brain cells in a comatose patient regenerate in a manner similar to embryonic/fetal development. That being said, it's not a very relevant point.
Finally, Pro dismisses the point about documentation as not relevant but dodges the question of social harm to parties other than unborn children.
Con, after accepting the debate, tries to dismiss the definition of personhood cited in the debate description. It can be assumed that "given moral consideration" means sufficient moral consideration to entail a right to live, as opposed to merely not causing pain, since both seem to agree pigs are excluded from personhood despite being moral patients. After reading this paragraph, and combined with a few other things I've seen, Con definitely loses the Conduct point. Let's move on.
Con, once again, tries to cite academics as conclusive empirical evidence, despite it being outside their purview to empirically answer a philosophical question when the facts that give rise to the question (future consciousness) are undisputed. Then he reiterates the social harm angle that he harped on in Round 1. Next, relating to the "uncertainty" argument, he repeats his yet unproven assumption that it's of no consequence to kill a live zygote, therefore there's no uncertainty. This amounts to "it's true because I say it's true".
Con says that a pig can feel pain or distress whereas a zygote presently cannot. This is true, but also circumstantial. One could, for example, instantly kill an unsuspecting pig by shooting it in the head with a sniper rifle from a great distance. Assuming one had perfect ability to pull this off without causing pain, the circumstances would not be more sketchy than killing a zygote. He says that a pig has already had experiences, and this fact confers moral value. I ask the question: if the zygote's future does not matter, then why does the pig's past? Neither is the present.
Before moving on, Con asserts that a society should not prioritize the rights of hypothetical future people over the rights of currently living people. However, humans routinely worry about the consequences of our actions for humans alive after we are dead. For example, concerns over the national debt or climate change. A reasonable person would not claim that because their future son or daughter hasn't been conceived yet, they are not concerned over the world said son or daughter will have to live in.
Con shoots down Pro's citations using the same. While this is fair game, assertions about philosophy, even those made by authoritative sources, hold no empirical weight in themselves. For example, if Pro believes that the harm principle should guide the actions of individuals, then he is not proven wrong simply because a webpage says so. Rather, he's proven wrong if and only if it can be demonstrated that his position is logically incoherent or self-contradictory.
At this point Con brings up the strongest point of his Round 1 argument: the violinist analogy. A person who "would die" hypothetically might not if extreme steps which violated another's rights were taken. Therefore, he argues, a zygote's hypothetical lifespan can only be calculated assuming said violation (of the mother). The zygote is constantly dependent on the mother's continued support to stay alive. This is a knot Pro must try to unravel going forward.
Next, Con challenges the teleological assumptions underpinning Pro's argument. Normally a zygote will develop into a fully developed person, but this could be, morally speaking, a coincidence or irrelevant fact. On this note he curiously draws a distinction between this and a comatose patient, who is already fully formed. However, the comatose patient is arguably not fully formed, because he does not have the functions of a conscious person. There is a similar teleological assumption here, though Con may solve this dilemma by saying that the comatose patient doesn't have rights. This is easy to do, but hard to swallow.
Finally, Con revisits Pro's assumption that killing some animals, such as pigs, is not problematic. A pig certainly is closer to sentience at the present moment than a zygote; if killing one is acceptable, he reasons, then so is killing a zygote.
In Round 2, Pro reiterates that, in his view, severing a fetus from its mother's womb is the cause of what consequences to it follow. This is not a sufficient challenge to the violinist analogy, because it takes as a given that the fetus has a right to be in the mother's womb, therefore removing it does it harm, and to avoid this harm it has a right to be in its mother's womb. This is circular reasoning. He could've argued for a child's entitlement to be protected from harms like exposure to the elements, but he doesn't say enough about this.
He draws a distinction between human fetuses and pigs because pigs are not human beings. At first, he doesn't properly explain why this definition of personhood is relevant. Like Con in Round 1, he falls back on a questionable appeal to consensus ("social contract"). But then he clarifies that a person will eventually enjoy greater sentience than a pig is capable of. I find this more satisfactory.
In Round 1, Pro uses analogies to demonstrate that immediate consciousness is not a necessary criterion for personhood. For example, a comatose person feels no pain and has no consciousness. They would feel no pain if killed then and there, but it would nonetheless be a violation of their rights because the future utility that they would enjoy, or plausible might enjoy, would or plausibly might be robbed without their consent. At the heart of Pro's argument is the assumption that future experiences ought to be given equal weight to present ones. If this can be disproven, then his Round 1 falls apart. And he argues that if said assumption might possibly be correct, then one should err on the side of caution and acknowledge the unborn child's rights.
Con draws a distinction between moral agents and moral patients, with the latter being that which merely can experience harm/suffering and the former being that which has a more complicated being. He references sources which attempt to define personhood, definitions which lean toward moral agents while excluding moral patients. This works if both sides would, or are obliged to, accept the definitions given by these sources. That's not the case here; Pro does not accept that attributes like "rationality or logical reasoning ability" must be immediately present for one to be a person, while for Con this is a takeaway from the sources which he cites. In the debate description, personhood was defined as "the point at which a human being ought to be given moral consideration". This is the definition that I'll accept as binding. Since this is a philosophical question, and since Con doesn't contest in Round 1 that a single-cell embryo is a "human being", Con's citations do not lend empirical weight toward their definition of personhood. So then, Con begins to debate the issue.
Con argues that recognizing personhood of zygotes is impractical. To be morally consistent, it would need to be generally, whereas most zygotes die naturally at the time of conception. Con argues that banning abortion causes medical harm to women, and can harm their economic prospects. This is self-evidently true. He argues that, to enforce the personhood of zygotes, it would be necessary to incarcerate all women who have abortions, which is impractical. On this note Con argues that most people, even pro-lifers, cannot bring themselves to fully consider the personhood of zygotes, since they can't bring themselves to support said mass incarceration of women who have early stage abortions. This argument holds weight if consensus is the most important criterion for personhood, but not if a accepted consensus on personhood can be considered objectively wrong per a different criterion.
I guess we'll see.
In the line you cited, where 'you' has no quotations, I write that you have what APPEARS TO BE the option of killing it. It's neither confirmed nor denied whether that choice is genuine; which applies is contingent on whether you're the original or a fake, which, again, is uncertain. The reason why the fakes are presented with the illusion of choice is to make the fakes seem truly indistinguishable from the original.
Granted, one problem with this scenario is that the original can't communicate with the fakes, so he just has to take the AI's word that they're faced with the illusion of choice, or even that the fakes exist at all. You may want to use this as an argument.
And no, I plan to participate. But I'm not a highly motivated individual so I might wait until the last minute to post my round.
Ultimately, the point of the Description is to explain a preexisting scenario. I didn't invent it; the people on the internet forum LessWrong did. Therefore, even if I did botch or omit some detail in the Description (and I don't believe I did), I don't believe it'd have the effect of derailing the entire debate.
The AI's motivation is, presumably, self-preservation. It has no reason to give a million people the ability to destroy it, as that would all but guarantee its death. The true original, meanwhile, has that ability regardless because he has an actual body and can smash the actual mainframe of the machine. The AI's actions are meant to deter the true original from destroying it.
Pay closer attention.
I originally wrote 'You are in a position to destroy it' without the full quotation marks around 'you'. But the language that made the final cut does have full quotation marks around 'you'. The reason I did this was to convey that the status of that person is unclear.
I had to explain the whole scenario or else this debate would be pointless. At that point, the reader didn't know about the million copies of the original person. They only knew about the original person. So I started from there and built up. But in case they would go back later and see if the first 'you' (the one with the true ability to destroy the machine) is identical with the person described later, I drew a distinction by putting full quotations around the first 'you' but not subsequently. The quotation marks don't confirm he's a different person, but it means we can't establish that he isn't.
I only commented what I did as a courtesy to avoid confusion later on. Common sense implies only the original has the kind of real access to the AI needed to destroy it, since the fake's entire world is generated by the AI. Voters would be aware of this whether I said anything or not.
Though, feel free to argue why this isn't the case.
I should clarify that if you're a fake, you don't have the option of destroying the AI. The choice presented is illusory.
Well, this one's on me for only making it 3 rounds long. I guess I'll have to leave it up to the voters to determine whether to take the content of your last round seriously or not. Nothing I can do about it now.
Anyhow, good debate.
Let me clarify that I meant to say:
"the human soul is made perfect *upon salvation* even in life but must still contend with the influences of a sinful body"
Islam's a fun topic. I think I would like to have this debate with Pro, if he's interested.
Fundamentalist is a buzz-word for modern people who approach the Christian faith on the same terms as virtually all Christians in history who lived before the late 19th century. It says more about its critics, who feel oddly entitled to make Christians believe differently than Christians used to.
Even if so, FLRW was laughably unqualified to cast an informed vote.
I don't want to be a butt about this, so I'll be reasonable: If anyone who can at least summarize my primary argument steps in to vote, I will accept it no matter which way they swing.
Or, if somebody known on DART for their good reading comprehension and a track record for quality voting certifies that they spent a decent amount of time sifting through my argument and couldn't understand it, then I'll accept the loss for failure to write coherently. But it mustn't be somebody like FLRW.
I request that moderation remove FLRW's vote.
It was Con's job to critically deconstruct my argument, and I maintain that he didn't successfully do this. Perhaps some find it distasteful that I turned a debate generally presumed beforehand to have scientific parameters into a philosophical one, but a debater must accept the possibility that his opponent will take things in an unusual direction and we agreed to no rule that would preclude such actions on my part. Nor was the resolution "Creationism is a scientific explanation for life on earth" or anything to that effect; merely that it was a "valid explanation", which theoretically would allow for any manner of rational inquiry even if it fell outside of the findings of conventional hard science, being "not precluded" thereby in terms of cognitive viability.
Once I went down that metaphoric rabbit hole, Con didn't prove himself up to the task of keeping up, or otherwise giving a reason for why the paradigm shift I put into play was or ought to have been considered irrelevant. Given this, it wasn't an outsider's place to randomly strut in, look over the debate for exactly 25 seconds, and go "Hahaha Con has better science so Pro loses."
But never mind that. Let's say for argument's sake that Con possibly did keep up and he possibly did refute my points. FLRW isn't in a position to establish whether this is true or false, as he doesn't understand what my argument was in the first place. If FLRW is yet ignorant of that, then he's in no position to establish that a counter-argument made against it by Con had sufficient weight to award Con the victory.
In Round 4, I specifically asked observers to refrain from voting if they didn't grasp the gist of what I was saying. While this isn't something Con and I both agreed to at the start of the debate, one could argue that I shouldn't have had to say it. That should've just been a given: that everyone has a right to be merited or demerited on the quality of what they actually wrote.
They do. It's just that birthing, and then expressing, a truly original thought is surprisingly hard. 99% of what you hear has been said before. In turn, 99% of that is shaped by influences around the speaker, such as by peers and pop culture and the newsmedia.
But there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. The first time you thought of it, it was novel to you, and worth saying to you.
Good.
Since you're back, I hope you'll do something for Round 4. Suffice to say there's no more chance to critique each other, but you can still put in a 10,000 character something to match and contrast with mine.
Hey.
Man. At the time that I'm writing this, it's not too late. Just submit something for Round 3 that's condensed enough to fit in 10,000 characters and then we can spent Round 4 critiquing each other's prompts.
If you're still active on DART, please respond to this message.
Hey,
Take this as a reminder you have about one day left to post. That's still plenty of time, I just wanted to make sure you don't forget about this debate.
Regardless, please do not forfeit.
Dude.
This is gonna be really awkward if I have to go into Round 2 with nothing to try to rebut.
If there's no other way to meet the deadline, copy and paste from some webpage (I'm sure there are thousands). I and the voters will excuse it this once. You have permission.
If you're going with your main draft then so will I. Let's make this one to remember.
I pretty much have two options here:
First, I can unload my big personal project onto this. It'll certainly be detailed. But there are some problems with that which I don't really want to go into, such as its dramatic length or diminished ability to use this concept elsewhere.
Second, I can make up something on the fly. I'm capable of doing this, but it won't be as impressive and Con might credibly win.
I more or less know what I want to say, but I wasn't ready to say it in Round 1. What I've written thus far doesn't constitute any sort of argument by itself so I understand your unease. However, I hope that I'll be able to make up for it in Rounds 2 and 3.
I have a question. Is it possible to post images on DART debates? And if so, what's the effect on character count? (I realize now that 10,000 characters might've been too little.)
I'd argue yes on the grounds of rational irrationality.
That is, a country makes up its mind ahead of time, as in "I have no choice or further control over my own actions. Under condition X, I must respond with action Y." This country becomes a slave to its earlier vow or policy even if, when the moment finally comes, it's irrational.
This appears to makes no sense at first glance. After all, when the moment comes it should be a decision based on current realities alone, right? But my answer is that a country which does not put itself in bondage to its past vow or policy has no credible deterrent at any point before X happens.
Thus, rational irrationality. It works effectively for every moment up until X, but if it could be simply reversed upon X then it paradoxically cannot have existed beforehand, meaning that it never had value.
I'd like to do this debate with someone.
Anyone. This is a field of very niche interest for me and I have no outlet.
He's not, but it wouldn't make any difference if he were. To be the reincarnation of Hitler, you have to be an anti-Semite. Being a "racist white supremacist bigot" is not enough to qualify.
But the fact is, even the Left has not gone out of its way of accusing Trump of being an anti-Semite. They've accused him of so much nonsense it's not even funny, but they didn't go down that one rabbit hole.
Accordingly, there was never any real pressure on Trump to "prove" that he's not anti-Semitic. I've yet to see him flout his Jewish cabinet as proof of his non-racism. And yet, all those Jewish people are still there, running his government.
Getting rid of Jews was Hitler's hot-button issue. There is zero compatibility between Hitler and a man who willingly and constantly surrounds himself with Jews.
Hitler died April 30. Trump was born in June 6 of the following year. Conception of Trump did not immediately follow death of Hitler, unless we assume a more than 13-month long pregnancy. Since that's never happened in the history of humanity, the date of Trump's birth isn't significant, aside that it's plausible so far as Trump wasn't alive at the same time as Hitler (but then again this same logic could be applied to, say, Obama).
But more importantly, whatever Trump may think about Hispanics or Arabs or Chinese people, he doesn't hate Jews, which was the group Hitler hated the most.
Jared Kushner, his son in law, is Jewish, as is his daughter Ivanka by conversion. A large number of other Jewish people occupy key positions in the Trump administration, and Trump was the one who appointed them to such. Hitler wouldn't have let a Jew within 100 feet of the White House, were he the POTUS reincarnated, much less choose one (Rudy Giulani) to be his main personal lawyer.
How so? It's true, isn't it? The Left both called for probes into his supposedly deteriorating mental health and claimed he was going to draw us into a war with Iran.
There've been a few close scrapes but so far WW3 hasn't happened. He's got less than a year left in his (first) term. Is Trump gonna do it or not?
"There is a possibility Trump will start a war to draw attention away from his mental breakdown."
Considering the Left's accused him of having dementia or Alzheimer's since Day 1 of his presidency, if he was going to do this it would've already happened sometime in the past 3 years, no?
Vietnam War was about 50,000-60,000 U.S. combat fatalities and that's not at all unfeasible.
To put things in perspective, about 2.8 million Americans are said to die from all causes every year. This is actually a low figure because it fails to count roughly 600,000 who die from abortion every year, more than half a million deaths which are almost completely ignored. COVID-19 deaths are unfortunate, of course. But assuming it remains below 100,000 total (as new estimates suggest it probably will) then it'll only constitute a marginal increase in the overall death rate in the U.S.
It worked in 1964 against Goldwater.
Yeah. There seems to be some misrepresentation about the mindsets that unite incels.
The sole two unifying factors of contemporary inceldom are:
1. That they are men who either have experienced rejection from women or believe that they would be rejected
2. That said rejection constitutes an injustice against them which ought to be responded to with hostility or aggression against women in general.
It's commonly claimed that incels feel entitled to sex or relationships with abnormally attractive women. While I'm sure this is true in some cases, it's not definitionally true. Many incels, being average men, may be content if a similarly average woman accepted them as a relationship partner, but they either lack the self-confidence to give this a try or are so caught up in the incel bubble that they consider it beneath themselves to have to be the one to ask (which, IMO, is not such an unfair thing for men to expect, it just isn't reality).
Does the technical composition of the universe matter if the end result is the same?
After all, if you're a simulation then you know that simulations possess the authentic ability to feel pleasure or pain. So how's that different from a real, non-simulated world?
It'd be different if you knew that nothing beside you could feel pleasure or pain, because simulations could not feel these things and only you were real. But there's no way to know that.
Thanks!
(Just now I did make passing mention of our country's high corporate tax rate, simply because there would've been a "hole" in the flow of the argument summary otherwise. Overall it was a fairly minor addition and I didn't link to a source so it was pretty much just me either making an opinionated assertion or pointing out something that's already general knowledge. In addition, adding that did not provide evidence to my earlier claim that a high/higher tax rate is bad for the economy, opting instead to merely say that there exists a high tax rate.)
How should I proceed? Should I forfeit this round to make it fair?
I actually heard an anecdote from my PoliSci professor once claiming that in Mexico, at the beginning of each month people's food stamps (or whatever equivalent to such they get over there) come in, and on that same day the prices on corn tortillas, a dietary staple, go through the roof, because all the stores know they can get away with doing it since their customers just got a big fat check from the government.
Unfortunately I couldn't find anything on this online.
*There would be no stigma attached
Aaaand that was all I had room to post.
I'm so sorry. I literally forgot about the debate over the course of Thanksgiving weekend. I'll be sure to post an argument soon.
"Perception based results aren’t reliable."
This. We live in a country where:
1. The culture is highly individualistic, dare I even say narcissistic, and everyone is constantly challenging and nitpicking every aspect of the status quo to find something unfair, whereas in a society like Singapore people in general would be less likely to question the way things are. A trip overseas would reveal that many East Asian countries have cultures (and especially corporate cultures) that are far more sexist than in the US, and yet American women would be far more likely to complain about sexism than, say, a Chinese or South Korean woman.
2. Social media allows an individual who's part of some demographic to share anecdotes about how he/she was presented with some kind of unfair situation because of their membership in said demographic. Readers/watchers who are also part of that demographic, if exposed to enough such anecdotes, may internalize it even if they themselves have never experienced the same, even if the anecdotes in question described events which, though widely sensationalized, were fringe occurrences. As a result, they come to perceive themselves to be subject to unfair treatment. This can happen with EXTREME ease. I myself have fallen victim to this effect before, on many occasions.
While you did establish the rough parameters of this debate, some clarification is in order.
"Talking about the realism of implementing UBI" means, say, arguing that Congress would never pass UBI into effect. We'll be assuming here that it could be passed and implemented.
Obviously I will be debating you on whether UBI would have good or bad effects. Otherwise there'd be no point.
@DynamicSquid I'm about to accept this debate. If someone else has already called dibs, then I suppose you can debate them too. It wouldn't be plagiarism for you to use the same opening arguments both times.
I haven't debated in a while and forcing myself to exercise that intellectual muscle just a tad will be good for me.
Jesus ordered his disciples to baptize people "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit" (Matt. 28:19). Jesus understood "the Father" to be God the Father (generally thought to be synonymous with YHWH of the Old Testament), Himself being "the Son", and the Holy Spirit is described in the Bible as He who came to believers after the end of Jesus's earthly ministry. Besides "The Word" (generally understood to be either an alternate name for The Son or for Scripture, which was divinely inspired by God), God is only understood in these three terms in the Christian canon, thus comprising a Trinity. This doesn't answer the question of whether the idea of the Trinity is pagan, but Pro's claim that the Trinity "is not explicitly found in the Bible" is false.