Is it unreasonable to assume Sam Harris is suffering from a mild case of Aspergers syndrome?

So what's your credential?

A fat jobless neet video gamer who dislikes internet atheists?

kek

o i m laffin

working on an app to helps with distribution of medical equipment(mostly Boston Scientific), sponsored by the EBRD.

What are your contributions to neuroscience, philosophy and literature?
Criticize Harris' philosophy if you want. But you shouldn't mock his achievements and credentials, especially if you've nothing to show yourself.

>show Harris is a meme
>fanboys rise up to defend their babby tier writer with ad hominens and "what did you do youself?"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_accomplishment

also, if you want to show Harris is more accomplished than the average chaner, atleast use the fact that he's a good martial artist, or that he has a wife and 2 kids.

His contributions to philosophy are literally nothing.

Are you dumb? This is exactly what you're doing. You're mocking Harris based on the percieved value of his achievements.

Read your own shits. He's a philosopher and a cognitive neuroscience making claims about human mental errors. His science background helps feed the evidence to his philosophical claims.

The Harris guy clearly knows what he's talking about and makes claims based on what he knows. Its perfectly okay to use what you know as support when you've knowledgeable in the department.

>It is not fallacious to rely on the testimony of a person who has attained a certain level of education or experience if they can produce further evidence to back up their positions when required
Read your own fucking wiki. You're however using "appeal to authority." You have no understanding of the subject and make false accusations based on wiki articles. This is pathetic.

No, i'm mocking him because he sucks at these things, and if we are to talk in anything related to science, what papers have you read, and who has referenced your experiments, define your career.
The only things people reference regarding his work are his shitty books on atheism.

I think he's said before that he wasn't interested in being an academic. He got his PhD in neuroscience so that he could understand the current literature in the field. His books don't make significant contributions to academia, but they're not trying to either. He is trying to influence the opinions of the general public on pertinent ethical issues, such as the problem of militant Islam, moral relativism, the ethical implications of the non-existence of libertarian free will, etc. Imo he is doing more good in the world than 99% of academics are.

>The Harris guy clearly knows what he's talking about and makes claims based on what he knows.
Ayy lmao
>guys, so utilitarianism is correct, just because;
>and the we will use some fancy sounding, but meaningless, principle using happiness and suffering as our utilitarian standard;
>add vague handwaves about brain scans being used to quantify such utilitarianism;
>?????
>guys, i just solved ethics;

>i read internet comic and i now in my hert jesus christ tells me harris is a dirty jew and wrong about god.

He sucks at these things, yet he went to school and graduated to be able to talk about them with some authority. Meanwhile, here you are, on Veeky Forums, unaccredited, getting butthurt and making fun of him for it. It doesn't follow.

The Moral Landscape essentially argued against the interpretation of the fact/value distinction as being equivalent to moral relativism. He argues, to a lay, public audience, that moral realism is true. He doesn't derive an ought from an is, he doesn't claim to. It's people who think that the is/ought distinction is the end of moral philosophy that he is arguing against.

do you know how many quacks have a degree?
Of course ill mock him, until someone shows me some contribution he made to science or philosophy.
>He argues, to a lay, public audience, that moral realism is true.
Using, as a said, a fancy, but vague and useless standard for determining if something is moral or not.

What contributions have you made to science or philosophy?
Do you not see how fallacious this is?

The internet is right at your finger tips.

You just use google to search his name, and his published works.

On basic principle, someone with a degree may have a smaller chance of being a quak than someone who doesn't. Someone with two degrees have even lower than than someone with only one degree or no degree.

Given that you've shown no degrees from yourself, we can assume you're the real quak.

I don't have to prove shit.
I'm not the one that decided to open his mouth on how ethics should work and make a fool of himself.

His argument is that we can know by reason alone that morality can only concern the mind states of conscious creatures. A universe full of rocks is a universe in which nothing of moral significance can happen. We can further know, through reason alone, that the concept of wellbeing, defined elastically enough so as to include anything a conscious creature might be capable of valuing, is what matters when we are talking about the moral consequences of our actions. You might take issue with his definition of wellbeing but as he himself argues, we use the term "health" in much the same way and that doesn't give us any problems. Wellbeing as Harris defines it includes everything from carnal pleasure to love and happiness to job satisfaction. I think it is obvious that Harris is right when he says that the wellbeing of conscious creatures is what morality is, or should, be concerned with.

You're the one opening your mouth claiming ethics shouldn't be how it is.

You haven't even given any valid reasons. All you've done is ask for the author's credentials again and again. When given those credentials, you've questioned the validity of the credentials. Then accused the author of being a "fool"

Would you, perhaps, like to produce some arguments as to why that might be, instead of throwing a fit?

He then says science can tell us what we ought to value, given the moral significance of wellbeing. Note that this is not deriving an ought from an is, but an ought from an ought, which is perfectly acceptable. We start off with the fact that conscious creatures value wellbeing. Just like if we value truth, we ought to also value reason, and concern for evidence, and logical consistency, if we value wellbeing, there re bound to be better and worse ways to achieve it. Harris does not suggest that science can tell us what we ought to value, but that it can tell us how to get what we value, i.e. wellbeing.

>His argument is that we can know by reason alone that morality can only concern the mind states of conscious creatures. A universe full of rocks is a universe in which nothing of moral significance can happen.
fair enough.
>We can further know, through reason alone, that the concept of wellbeing, defined elastically enough so as to include anything a conscious creature might be capable of valuing, is what matters when we are talking about the moral consequences of our actions.
Maybe not.
For example, i think what the aztecs call neltiliztli is more important.
aeon.co/ideas/what-the-aztecs-can-teach-us-about-happiness-and-the-good-life
>You might take issue with his definition of wellbeing but as he himself argues, we use the term "health" in much the same way and that doesn't give us any problems.
Except health is arguably pretty well defined, since we have a standard functioning of a human body we can compare to.
>Wellbeing as Harris defines it includes everything from carnal pleasure to love and happiness to job satisfaction. I think it is obvious that Harris is right when he says that the wellbeing of conscious creatures is what morality is, or should, be concerned with.
It is not.
It's basically ethical hedonism, and has pretty much the same objections.

I think every atheist has a bit of the 'tism.

I had a quick look at the Neltliztli definition and it seems roughly to mean a "worthwhile life". What Harris would say is that this a particular kind of wellbeing. The reason he defines wellbeing so elastically is to account for the possibility that pure hedonistic pleasure, or "happiness", or anything else might not be what optimally satisfies us. So if it is true that we are more satisfied with a "worthwhile" life than with a life of pure hedonism, then that is a morally relevant fact.

As for the health example I gave, perhaps "fitness" is a better analogy to the concept of wellbeing. There are many different kinds of fitness or ways to be fit, you can be a marathon runner, or a sprinter or a weightlifter for example. All of these are types of fitness, but it's kind of hard to pin down what we're talking about given the range of things that can be classed as fitness. The same is true of Harris' definition of wellbeing.

I don't think that Harris' argument is equivalent to ethical hedonism. Hedonism is one form of "wellbeing" and it might just be true that it is less satisfying than other forms of wellbeing. It might be that living like a monk, never engaging in sexual activity and meditating in isolation all day is actually what provides maximal wellbeing. Or it might not. All Harris is arguing for is that we use science to find out.

wouldn't that also lead sometimes to appalling acts to increase such things?
Say, getting rid of a minority to increase social stability.

That is a pretty common kind of argument against utilitarian kinds of moral theories. From what I've gathered from listening to Harris, is that he thinks these kinds of arguments caricature consequentialism. Most people think that consequentialism is equivalent to treating people as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. However they are real consequences, both in the world and in our own minds, to treating people as ends rather than means. I think Harris' answer would be a world in which minorities or the disabled were routinely massacred would not be a world that would make anyone happier, and would not be a world anyone would want to live in, and for consequentialist reasons.

>I think Harris' answer would be a world in which minorities or the disabled were routinely massacred would not be a world that would make anyone happier,

Aide from abortion

>high intellect is undistinguishable from asburgers
kek

name one genius who didn't have assburgers
you literally can't name a single one

If fetuses are not conscious then they are not morally relevant, according to Harris.

edison

Yeah, according to Harris and some other pro-choice people, it is the loss of the conscious self that makes killing wrong, because we are essentially just self conscious minds. Thus, if a being is killed prior to the development of its conscious self (such as in abortion), no harm occurs. Likewise if the conscious self is lost at any point later in life (such as someone falling into an irreversible coma), then that person has died, even if his body is biologically alive.

However, imagine a case in which a four-year old boy is dying from a rare disease. We have a drug that can save his life, but it will cause him to lose all of his memories and return him to the psychological state of an infant. Should we erase the boy's memories or let him die? I think most people would agree that we should save his life.

But under Harris's view, the acts of letting the boy die and erasing his memories while saving his life are equivalent. Both acts destroy the conscious self, so there should be no difference, and hence no difficulty in choosing the "correct" course of action. But since people see death as being worse than the child losing his memories. I believe this provides evidence that a person is not just a mind but a union of body and mind. This implies that a person begins to exist prior to the development of a conscious mind after birth.