seeds wrote: ↑Sat Dec 07, 2024 2:42 am
What, exactly,
are his ideas?
He started with his criticism of Islam and wants to promote his kind of moral realism. He encountered online resistance from moral antirealists, like Peter Holmes, for example. PH took a realist position and something akin to the Hume is ought distinction. Regardless of PHs approach, VA met resistence that could be seen as a realist (perhaps physicalist) denial of the existence of objective morals. So, he turned to antirealisms of various kinds, since this could undermine realism, the is ought distinction and allow him to say that morals are as objective as other facts about the nature of things. Kant can be useful here also. So, he became an ontological antirealist and then later a very Kantian version of this. He may have loved Kant before this, but his first forays into ontological antirealism were not as centered on Kant as they are now.
He wants to introduce a kind of virtue ethics based on neuroscience, for example. He does not accept that his approach is virtue ethics, but given that he is not about creating the objectively correct moral rules, but influencing the attitudes of people so that they tend to do good and avoid the bad/evil, it is very much kin to that. So, note: I am not saying he is a virtue ethicist and he will say things that are very deontological, but in practice he doesn't want to set up top down deontological controls in society but rather develop people's characters so that they tend not to....have abotions, for example.
I think his core is aligned with1) attacking Islam and other systems of belief he considers pernicious. So, there is an anti-certain-systems set of beliefs.
And his heart lies with 2) promoting a kind of moral realism and his particular values as objective, considering he can demonstrate their objectivity via science and what he calls the moral FSERC.
From your long-term experiences conversing with him, what do you. Atla, and Flash each interpret VA's core beliefs to actually be?
The only thing I can come up with is that he (justifiably) hates any religion (especially Islam) where the prevailing Deity commands violence and death for non-believers.
And therefore, he believes that if he can somehow prove to the whole world (via Kantian philosophy) that God is an "illusion" ("an impossibility to be real") by equating the concept of God with his misunderstanding of Kant's noumenon,...
I think he misunderstands Kant also. I do think he loves Kant and admires him. But I also think he is extremely intrumentalist: he takes on beliefs that counter the resistance he meets.
...then - presto-chango - humanity (based solely on VA's interpretation of the CPR) can eventually (within a century or two?) wean itself off of violence-inducing (God-centered) religions such as Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, and thus be open to adopting a more neutral and peaceful belief system such as, say, Buddhism, for example.
Buddhism does have its own history of violence, but yes, I think this is part of his utopian vision.
And even that comes with the addendum that even Buddhism can eventually be discarded once everyone truly realizes (as VA has realized) the deep and wonderful truth that not only is life utterly meaningless with no ultimate purpose for us as individuals,...
...but also, that the unfathomable order of the universe is simply a product of the blind and mindless processes of chance.
I haven't seen this part of his beliefs. It doesn't quite fit with what I've seen either.
I can already imagine the warm and beautiful future of our funeral system where someone reads from the CPR (make that VA's interpretation of the CPR) to comfort the family and friends of the deceased by assuring them that (other than their material body) there was never anything actually "real" about the person they loved.
Same as above, but I could easily have missed this.
Indeed, the mourners will be tenderly reminded that they must never entertain any hope of ever experiencing their loved-one's presence again in the form of such nonsense as that of a "soul," for example.
And that's because, just like God, the soul,...
Even though Kant considered the noumenon of the immortal soul necessary for humans to be moral agents. He interprets this as meaning they need to think they have one not that Kant thought such a thing was possible. Even if this is true then he is going against Kant by saying all noumena are not real and do not exist.
In other words, he must have, as you suggested,
a "catastrophic fear" that if he admits to being wrong about anything whatsoever (no matter how trivial), he will lose his sense of infallibility, and his bones will spontaneously break into pieces.
Or he gets off on denying things. Since he is a sloppy thinker, I've had that interpretation that he can't bear admitting he made anything more than a slight misstep. But perhaps he gets off on never admitting he is wrong. Who knows?