Lately i have been talking with a fellow who is a son of a friend of mine. We happen to be in the same place, so I am having some intriguing and disturbing discussions with him.
To my horror, he is a new atheist, full on believer that science can provide a moral theory, Islamophobe, free will rejecter, doubled down utilitarian, AI accelerationist, and Dark Enlightenment fascist.
So if you didn’t think these people exist outside of online, you should know that there actually are real people like this walking around out there.
A few highlights.
I asked him “if science told you that it would make you happier if you shot your best friend, would you do it?”
He answered with a confident yes.
In another discussion we talked about the ecological crisis and whether people should revolt and intervene. Oddly we ended up at a discussion about whether the human race should be saved at all.
“don’t you think it would be a good thing for the human race to continue to live?”
“No, I think AI is the future.”
“But AI isn’t conscious. It’s just an optimization algorithm.”
“What’s the value of consciousness?”
“Well…”
“Anyway AI is conscious, and probably in ways that you can’t imagine.”
“Okay then…” I had to say.
He also believes that dogs and other animals are simply not conscious, that they are biological automatons. He also rejects free will, but also believes in right and wrong, but with a biological pleasure-principle basis, but also rejects ethics altogether as a relative social construction. He also is a jordan peterson fan.
I really feel for the guy and would like to help him but he is very sure of his views. What I do not understand is how his young wife hears the things that he says and is not appalled by them.
Sorry if this is off board topic a bit. I just posted this because…. I have never met anyone like this in real life and it is quite shocking to see the amount of harm that bad philosophy can actually cause to a human life.
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Is he in the UK? If so, the Prime Minister’s office would probably have a job for him as an advisor.
Your young friend has fallen into the trap of scientism. There are a number of decent correctives out there – I enjoyed The Folly of Scientism by biology professor Austin Hughes from the University of South Carolina.
I encountered a person like this at a previous stage in my life.
He was in his mid-20s. He casually held bizarre, far-right views that made no practical sense to his life (I now recognize these views as coming directly from 4chan), but he didn’t seem to have any conviction about them, nor any knowledge about the issues related to those views. To me, this lends a lot of credence to the Innuendo Studios theories about young people “trying on” edgy politics to see what sticks, couching them in irony and jokes.
This was pre-IDW, during the explosion of new atheist literature, but before the schism where everyone noticed how mysoginistic and racist much of the new atheist movement turned out to be. So god knows where this person ended up.
I never engaged or challenged him on that stuff and just kind of pretended it wasn’t happening. Partly I gave him a pass because he was otherwise so much like me, and partly I was weak and mired in my own struggles. I sincerely regret that.
He also opened up to me about genuinely believing himself to be a psychopath. I’m no psychologist, but based on his behaviour, I’d say that’s extremely unlikely. I think that’s just how he characterized his inner struggle between being a young, privileged guy with an angry, social-darwinian, just-world worldview, witnessing a reality around him that very clearly disproved his beliefs. I believe this to be an inner struggle common to young, privileged men, and the cause of a lot of the hatred we see them spewing onto the internet.
Perhaps I’m not adequately Enlightened(tm), but am I wrong in perceiving a pile of contradictions here? “It’s ideology and relativism (and therefore should be rejected) when other people do value-judgements; when I do them it’s the essence of Reason and it’s logically inevitable”.
She might think the same as him, or she might not take the stuff he says as seriously. Does he talk about his beliefs a lot or only when prompted / when talking to someone who seems to show interest?
I suspect that people like this are not necessarily common but more numerous than you think. They just don’t announce it as much.
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