{"id":368,"date":"2010-08-06T16:19:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-06T16:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2010\/08\/one-last-look-at-sight\/"},"modified":"2012-04-10T21:29:38","modified_gmt":"2012-04-11T01:29:38","slug":"one-last-look-at-sight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2010\/08\/one-last-look-at-sight.html","title":{"rendered":"One last look at sight"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

This post is part of a series on morality and mathematics<\/a>. \u00a0If you\u2019re not into timeless conceptions of physics<\/a>, you should probably check out the other posts first.<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m swear at some point I\u2019m going to finish up with the sight metaphor and get back to some of the posts I had planned, but in the comments of one of yesterday\u2019s posts<\/a>, Hendy brought up one idea I really want to address.<\/p>\n

Hendy said:<\/p>\n

Essentially, we seem to have honed in on what humans value and made systems that support those aims. If we took away the humans, would objective moral values still exist?<\/p>\n

Part of my objection stems from the fact that morality is such a \u201ccloudy\u201d field and that of the senses is not (e.g. your analogy using sight). My objection to this moral \u201csense\u201d is the same as my objection to those who claim (like WL Craig) that god can \u201cimmediately and powerfully be known.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If we\u2019re worried about what happens to morality if humans don\u2019t exist, I think it\u2019s fair to be equally worried about sight and visual existence. It\u2019s easy to think of the visual nature of objects as an absolute, intrinsic property that we just happen to observe, but I disagree. Our conception of seen objects is incredibly tailored to humans. We can\u2019t see ultraviolet patterning on flowers<\/a> or any other wave outside of the narrow spectrum of visible light.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

Of course, that trouble pales in comparison to the fact that we can\u2019t see objects as they really are at all. At the scale at which we see and live, all objects appear to be solid, rather than largely empty structures of atoms, or, if you drill down deep enough, quarks. Our level of existence is a valid interpretation of the physical nature of matter at the scale where humans live and see<\/em>. If no perceiving creature existed at our scale, the question of whether objects existed as we see them would quickly become a philosophical riddle.<\/p>\n

The way I choose to think of it goes back to topology. My visual perceptions aren\u2019t of the object itself but are more like taking a slice of an >n-dimensional object and embedding it in n-dimensional space. There\u2019s nothing wrong<\/em> with my perception, but it\u2019s incompleteness can lead me astray and make me uncomfortable if I get a look at a different slice.<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

I think I\u2019ll close with a quotation from Eliezer Yudkowsky\u2019s excellent fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality<\/a><\/em>. In the selection below, Harry (who has been raised by a scientist, instead of the Dursleys, is trying to break the law of Transfiguration that claims you can only alter something as a complete unit.<\/p>\n

All right, screw this nineteenth-century garbage.<\/p>\n

Reality wasn\u2019t atoms, it wasn\u2019t a set of tiny billiard balls bopping around. That was just another lie. The notion of atoms as little dots was just another convenient hallucination that people clung to because they didn\u2019t want to confront the inhumanly alien shape of the underlying reality. No wonder, then, that his attempts to Transfigure based on that hadn\u2019t worked. If he wanted power, he had to abandon his humanity, and force his thoughts to conform to the true math of quantum mechanics.<\/p>\n

There were no particles<\/em>, there were just clouds of amplitude in a multiparticle configuration space<\/em> and what his brain fondly imagined to be an eraser was nothing except a gigantic factor<\/em> in a wavefunction that happened to factorize<\/em>, it didn\u2019t have a separate existence any more than there was a particular solid factor of 3 hidden inside the number 6, if his wand was capable of altering factors in an approximately factorizable wavefunction<\/em> then it should damn well be able to alter the slightly smaller<\/em> factor that Harry\u2019s brain visualized as a patch of material on the eraser \u2013<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you want to know if Harry\u2019s Transfiguration works, you should check out\u00a0the fic<\/a> in your free time this weekend.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is part of a series on morality and mathematics. \u00a0If you\u2019re not into timeless conceptions of physics, you should probably check out the other posts first. I\u2019m swear at some point I\u2019m going to finish up with the sight metaphor and get back to some of the posts I had planned, but in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[149,138,150,144],"class_list":["post-368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epistemologyphilosophy","tag-map-and-territory","tag-math-and-morality","tag-mismatched-frames-of-reference","tag-moral-sense-perception"],"yoast_head":"\nOne last look at sight<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This post is part of a series on morality and mathematics. \u00a0If you're not into timeless conceptions of physics, you should probably check out the other\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2010\/08\/one-last-look-at-sight.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"One last look at sight\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This post is part of a series on morality and mathematics. \u00a0If you're not into timeless conceptions of physics, you should probably check out the other\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2010\/08\/one-last-look-at-sight.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Unequally Yoked\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-08-06T16:19:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2012-04-11T01:29:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_b7Eh98KJ_qI\/TFxtNvl1eoI\/AAAAAAAABBg\/Xy4gnWKwV4Q\/s320\/flower.jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Leah Libresco\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Leah Libresco\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2010\/08\/one-last-look-at-sight.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2010\/08\/one-last-look-at-sight.html\",\"name\":\"One last look at sight\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2010-08-06T16:19:00+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2012-04-11T01:29:38+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/#\/schema\/person\/17ee17592b35b40040d5f5f7ea5ab464\"},\"description\":\"This post is part of a series on morality and mathematics. \u00a0If you're not into timeless conceptions of physics, you should probably check out the other\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2010\/08\/one-last-look-at-sight.html#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2010\/08\/one-last-look-at-sight.html\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2010\/08\/one-last-look-at-sight.html#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"One last look at sight\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/\",\"name\":\"Unequally Yoked\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/#\/schema\/person\/17ee17592b35b40040d5f5f7ea5ab464\",\"name\":\"Leah Libresco\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/20e1e6a3a94c4e7928687804a41d888d?s=96&d=mm&r=r\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/20e1e6a3a94c4e7928687804a41d888d?s=96&d=mm&r=r\",\"caption\":\"Leah Libresco\"},\"description\":\"Leah is the author of Arriving at Amen and Building the Benedict Option. 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