Moral philosophy transplanted from Disney thread

[nafregnum]

You folks are too good.  First, @Longnose has ChatGPT take our conversation and rap about morality, then @formthirteen has it sarcastically define philosophy in the best way ever, and then @DooDiligence tops it off with "Blessed are the cheesemakers." -- too, too good, thanks for some good laughs this morning.

 

By the way, from the options given about how God is variously defined, I do like the formulation of "God is everything, the whole universe, all being, including all people dead, living, and yet to be."  Thich Nhat Hanh has a quote I like which sort of leads to this idea:

 

Quote

 

“The flower is made of non-flower elements. We can describe the flower as being full of everything. There is nothing that is not present in the flower.  We see sunshine, we see the rain, we see clouds, we see the earth, and we also see time and space in the flower.

A flower, like everything else, is made entirely of non-flower elements. The whole cosmos has come together in order to help the flower manifest herself, The flower is full of everything except one thing: a separate self, a separate identity.

The flower cannot be by herself alone. The flower has to inter-be with the sunshine, the cloud and everything in the cosmos. If we understand being in terms of inter-being, then we are much closer to the truth. Inter-being is not being and it is not non-being. Inter-being means being empty of a separate identity, empty of a separate self,”

 

 

[Guest]

17 hours ago, nafregnum said:

 

https://moralfoundations.org/

 

Jonathan Haidt has some interesting theories and research, covered in brief on that page but in more depth in his book "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion"

 

The gist of it is that evolution baked into us a basic framework of "moral taste buds" -- we can tell when something is fundamentally unfair, or when someone is being disloyal or cheating, etc.  Troops of monkeys with an overly vicious alpha will naturally form a coalition to do away with the tyrant.  Sic semper tyrannis, since before humans walked the earth.  I remember hearing about a study with monkeys where two monkeys are separated but they can see each other, and they each have to do the same task in order to get a reward.   The first monkey is given some grapes, a favorite food for them.  The second monkey sees this. Then the second monkey is given some cucumber slices instead of grapes for its reward.  The second monkey brain must emotionally be screaming "UNFAIR!" because it takes the cucumber slices and throws them in the face of the lab tech.  Being able to detect when things seem fair will tend to lead toward survival of the group, so genes which help us detect fair treatment have been kindly baked in through evolution, or they're god-given by his/her magnificent evolutionary process.  

 

We've got a lot of pro-social genetic behaviors baked in like that.  We experience a thing called "Elevation Emotion" when we witness acts of moral beauty.  Just witness this pizza delivery guy who saved a bunch of kids from a burning house and try not to feel elevation emotion.  That feeling is baked in to most of us (minus perhaps the psychopaths)

 

 

 

But that's just the beginning.  Biological evolution gets you to cave man level where life is pretty much like the Hobbes quote "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."  Then comes the cultural dynamics. 

 

By the power of language we have shared stories and myths.  Using these shared stories, we humans have been improving on our genetic hardware by installing new moral ideas as software "Necktop Apps" (Daniel Dennett's fun term) ... we build agreed sets of guidelines and hard rules for the really important stuff ... but it has morphed over time.  We have evidence that very ancient people used to kill children and bury them under the foundation stones of new dwellings.  Perhaps their gods told them that it helped ward off evil spirits.  Warding of evil spirits was an important concern through the ages.  People in England during Shakespeare's time would put three big scratch marks on their fireplace mantles to repel witches who might otherwise descend into the house through the chimney.  Even up through the middle 1800s in American folk religious belief, people used "Lamen parchments" with religious power words on them like "Tetragrammaton" and seven pointed stars and funky line drawings, and amulets on necklaces and coin shaped talismans.    Why did they stop sacrificing kids?  In the Abrahamic tradition it's arguable that they stopped because of the story of Abraham and Isaac and the ancient interpretation which is essentially: "This story proves it's okay to stop killing kids, and kill rams and sheep instead."  To our modern minds it is so far out of context that it just looks like Abraham had a psychotic break and turned murderous on his kid. 

 

 

Just because something is "made up" as you say, it doesn't mean it has no power.  Money is "made up" and yet Osama Bin Laden, a great hater of all things USA, had suitcases full of dollars.  Why?  Because if everyone else in the world agrees that you can trade suitcases full of green paper for real physical goods, then it's real.  

 

The superpower of humans is our ability to have millions or billions of people share the same ideas and act according to them.  

 

Take the story of Job in the Old Testament.  I don't think that guy really existed and I don't think god and satan placed bets on how far he could be pushed, etc.  But whether or not Job was a real person is like the least interesting question you could ask about the text.  The interesting questions are along the lines of, "What were the authors grappling with and how did this story serve their community?  What can we learn from the story?"  Can anyone name one single way in which the story of Job is _more_ powerful if there is a real human versus an allegory.  Our lives are uncertain and temporary.  Against this backdrop, the human mind craves certainties.  I admit I grew up believing Job was a totally real person, but I find the story so much more interesting when I'm not painted into that corner of believing an all powerful being did a good guy so dirty just because of a bet.  There are plenty of hints that Job wasn't real, by the way, which is why I changed my mind.  (There are multiple different endings to the story right there in the text of the old testament, for example -- and this is a pretty good indication that some editing was taking place.)

 

One more way to look at it: Aesops Fable of the Tortoise and Hare.  Does the power of that fable derive from the fact that a real tortoise one day had a race with a hare and won because he kept at it slow and steady?  Nope.  But when you're having a hard slog of it one day, you might remember the old story and feel a bit of inspiration to just keep plugging away at your task and eventually complete it.  The inspiration came from the story, not from a literal physical race.

 

 

At least when the atheists think there's a right thing to do they can be expected to give you their rationale.  Because they aren't leaning their moral authority against the idea of a god, they basically _have to_ back up their arguments and try to be convincing.  On the other hand, I have often experienced an exasperating form of know-it-all-ism where religionists think they get to declare "This is what is right, both for me and for you.  Because god."  And then they walk off like they think they just dropped the mic.  I don't think any human deserves that much unquestioned loyalty.  That kind of environment would be an incubator for religious tyrants.

 

When you boil it all down, why would you say our sense of morality needs to be founded on a god, I mean the kind that exists even when nobody believes in him/her?  Why does that provide anything better than what we've got which is a set of moral rules that have evolved with our civilizations?  

 

If there really does exist an unambiguous Absolute Morality with a real god backing it up, then which god is it and what are the North Star rules?  And more to the point, why would those rules be _more_ valid if the god is real?  

 

With Job, the first time I went through it I did not think it was literal history. I came to faith a little later (30') in life and I didn't even realize Christians saw Jesus as God. I was really floored by that. I always wondered why Christians always had pictures of Jesus in churches but not of God. I understand it now though. Haha

 

So my basic premise is that morality stems from God or evolution. If evolution is the source, morality is ultimately, just an evolutionary instinct. Many of those instincts helped us survive in the past but go against our best interest now. Look at the fear instinct near market bottoms or the hunger for fat and sugar instinct. In modern times, if one blindly follows those, they'll be far poorer and more unhealthy than if they choose to override them.

 

So, back to the morality instinct. Why follow it when it goes against our best interest? Giving to charity hurts us by giving our resources to a rival. Is that smart? You can say the same thing about helping someone drowning. You are risking your resources (ie life) to help a rival.

 

If God is the source, then making these decisions can make sense because morality is bigger than us. There is a moral code we "ought" to follow even if we'd prefer not to. It makes sense to help someone drowning or give to charity because they like each of us, are image bearers of God - not simply sacks of skin and bones flying on a rock in space.

 

Someone mentioned "progress" and how that's tied to morality. Who determines "progress" though? The Nazis had their version. What's wrong with wanting to toss out poor genetic material, after all?

 

If the Nazis won, wouldn't we all be admiring Hitler for saving the world from diseases, competitors or whatever else?

[Guest]

21 hours ago, dwy000 said:

"the right thing to do" is obviously an opinion - regardless of whether it comes from an atheist or religion.  Replace it by saying it's the "nice thing to do" which is how it's intended almost every time.  We demand evidence of god because religious people want us to adhere to their rules based on something we don't believe in.  

 

Do you think someone should be forced to make a cake against their conscience?

[Guest]

7 hours ago, vinod1 said:

It is bit concerning to think

 

OMG! The only reason you are not murdering your neighbors and raping women is because the Invisible Man said so? If for some reason, they were not mentioned or if there is a over-the-air update to the rules from the Invisible Man in the future which allows these things, you would merrily go along? 

 

Well, that is sort of true. If God doesn't exist, it's by sheer chance evolution didn't wire me (or you) to get a high off of murder or rape. We wouldn't have any free will. Ultimately, we'd just be tap dancing to whatever the chemicals in our brains made us do. That's what those "evil" rapists do, right?

 

[rkbabang]

11 minutes ago, stahleyp said:

 

Well, that is sort of true. If God doesn't exist, it's by sheer chance evolution didn't wire me (or you) to get a high off of murder or rape. We wouldn't have any free will. Ultimately, we'd just be tap dancing to whatever the chemicals in our brains made us do. That's what those "evil" rapists do, right?

 

 

 

You don't understand evolution very well.  It isn't by sheer chance that we don't get high off of murder or rape.  If wiring us that way gave us an advantage that's the way we'd be, the fact that most of us aren't wired that way tells me that having the moral compass we have is what gave us a survival advantage.  There is nothing in the universe that cares about humans, except for humans.

 

[Blugolds]

18 minutes ago, rkbabang said:

 

 

You don't understand evolution very well.  It isn't by sheer chance that we don't get high off of murder or rape.  If wiring us that way gave us an advantage that's the way we'd be, the fact that most of us aren't wired that way tells me that having the moral compass we have is what gave us a survival advantage.  There is nothing in the universe that cares about humans, except for humans.

 

^^ this, I tried previously to explain this with the analogy.

 

This is pretty basic stuff here. Maybe a simpler analogy instead of eskimos, horses. 
 

You have a stable full for racing. You make them all run 1 mile and record times. Each year you do the same, and you take the bottom 25% with slowest times and you kill them. The fastest horses are kept and breed and each year the cycle repeats. Race, time, cut the bottom 25%. After several cycles your avg overall 1 mile time for the stable as a group will increase.

 

This is a management style taught in business school. Continually cut the bottom performers, refresh and reevaluate, and do it again. The winners remain and the losers are gone and the overall performance of the company by whatever metric you choose increases in the direction you want. 
 

Human behavior to advance civilization is the same, just stretched out over thousands of years. 
 

Hard to see how this is not so obvious. But to be fair, the other side of the discussion probably feels the same way about my viewpoint. At the end of the day, who cares, if it’s working for someone and improving their life to believe the way they do, good!

 

 

[rkbabang]

21 minutes ago, Blugolds11 said:

^^ this, I tried previously to explain this with the analogy.

 

This is pretty basic stuff here. Maybe a simpler analogy instead of eskimos, horses. 
 

You have a stable full for racing. You make them all run 1 mile and record times. Each year you do the same, and you take the bottom 25% with slowest times and you kill them. The fastest horses are kept and breed and each year the cycle repeats. Race, time, cut the bottom 25%. After several cycles your avg overall 1 mile time for the stable as a group will increase.

 

This is a management style taught in business school. Continually cut the bottom performers, refresh and reevaluate, and do it again. The winners remain and the losers are gone and the overall performance of the company by whatever metric you choose increases in the direction you want. 
 

Human behavior to advance civilization is the same, just stretched out over thousands of years. 
 

Hard to see how this is not so obvious. But to be fair, the other side of the discussion probably feels the same way about my viewpoint. At the end of the day, who cares, if it’s working for someone and improving their life to believe the way they do, good!

 

 

 

 

Exactly.  Also it might not even be that our repulsion to rape and murder gives us an evolutionary advantage (although I think it does), it could just be a side effect of something else that gives us an advantage.  If trait A gives a massive evolutionary advantage, but causes trait B which is a small cost, it would still be worth it.  So, say having the ability to put ourselves in another beings shoes and understand what that being is thinking and feeling, and thus what it will likely do, gives us a huge advantage, that "empathy" also comes with a revulsion to rape and murder may just be an insignificant side effect, evolutionarily speaking.  Either way the universe is what it is and we have evolved the way we did.

 

 

[Blugolds]

@rkbabangyeah thats an interesting thought and IMO makes perfect sense...potential for behaviors/traits to develop and pass along through the generations that are not necessarily a positive contributing to advancement and "selected" to lead and continue...but also not bad enough to be weeded out. Interesting to think about where that "line" might be and maybe those things/traits that arent a hard NO for advancement, but also arent a strong YES will eventually fall off, but maybe it just takes longer to weed out. 

 

I dont know if you are familiar with the Russian farm fox experiment, I first read about it in a big article in National Geographic many years ago. 

 

The interesting thing to me, and what made me think about and remember this was what you said about insignificant side effects or unintended results that arent a game changer either way...showing up. 

 

And thats exactly what has happened with these fox. Breeding based ONLY on level of tameness, and the continuation and encouragement of that trait alone. But other traits that were "insignificant" but shared with current domesticated dogs started showing up. Changes in color of the coat, ears started drooping, tails started curling, craniofacial morphology, the face of the fox started to change to a more juvenile look. 

 

-For the last 59 years (2018) a team of Russian geneticists led by Lyudmila Trut have been running one of the most important biology experiments of the 20th, and now 21st, century. The experiment was the brainchild of Trut’s mentor, Dmitri Belyaev, who, in 1959, began an experiment to study the process of domestication 

-Every generation he and his team would test hundreds of foxes, and the top 10% of the tamest would be selected to parent the next generation. They developed a scale for scoring tameness, and how a fox scored on this scale was the sole criteria for selecting foxes to parent the next generation. 

-Belyaev knew that many domesticated species share a suite of characteristics including floppy ears, short, curly tails, juvenilized facial and body features, reduced stress hormone levels, mottled fur, and relatively long reproductive seasons. Today this suite of traits is known as the domestication syndrome. Belyaev found this perplexing. Our ancestors had domesticated species for a plethora of reasons—including transportation (e.g., horses), food (e.g., cattle) and protection (e.g., dogs)—yet regardless of what they were selected for, domesticated species, over time, begin to display traits in the domestication syndrome. Why? Belyaev hypothesized that the one thing our ancestors always needed in a species they were domesticating was an animal that interacted prosocially with humans. We can’t have our domesticates-to-be trying to bite our heads off. And so he hypothesized that the early stages of all animal domestication events involved choosing the calmest, most prosocial-toward-human animals: I will refer to this trait as tameness, though that term is used in many different ways in the literature. Belyaev further hypothesized that all of the traits in the domestication syndrome were somehow or another, though he didn’t know how or why, genetically linked to genes associated with tameness.

-Belyaev was correct that selection on tameness alone leads to the emergence of traits in the domestication syndrome. In less than a decade, some of the domesticated foxes had floppy ears and curly tails (Fig. 2). Their stress hormone levels by generation 15 were about half the stress hormone (glucocorticoid) levels of wild foxes. Over generations, their adrenal gland became smaller and smaller. Serotonin levels also increased, producing “happier” animals. Over the course of the experiment, researchers also found the domesticated foxes displayed mottled “mutt-like” fur patterns, and they had more juvenilized facial features (shorter, rounder, more dog-like snouts) and body shapes (chunkier, rather than gracile limbs) (Fig. 3). Domesticated foxes like many domesticated animals, have longer reproductive periods than their wild progenitors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway, some of that is basically what I was trying to say regarding horses. And the insignificant traits in the fox could also have similarities in humans. If you understand these basics, the concept that the SAME thing is/has happened to humans over thousands of years, IMO it makes more sense. 

 

The article goes into more detail regarding explanation of genetics, brain chemistry if you want to look into it further. I find it really fascinating. 

 

https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-018-0090-x

[DooDiligence]

11 hours ago, nafregnum said:

A flower, like everything else, is made entirely of non-flower elements. The whole cosmos has come together in order to help the flower manifest herself, The flower is full of everything except one thing: a separate self, a separate identity.

The flower cannot be by herself alone. The flower has to inter-be with the sunshine, the cloud and everything in the cosmos. If we understand being in terms of inter-being, then we are much closer to the truth. Inter-being is not being and it is not non-being. Inter-being means being empty of a separate identity, empty of a separate self,”

 

hydrogen to helium

helium to carbon

supernova everything up to iron

finally, flowers...

Edited March 10, 2023 by DooDiligence

[dwy000]

7 hours ago, stahleyp said:

 

Do you think someone should be forced to make a cake against their conscience?

I have no idea what this has to do with the discussion, but no, absolutely not - as long as they own the business it's their right to make that decision.  If you're an employee, you do lots of things you don't necessarily agree with all the time because that's part of the job.  

[dwy000]

7 hours ago, stahleyp said:

 

Well, that is sort of true. If God doesn't exist, it's by sheer chance evolution didn't wire me (or you) to get a high off of murder or rape. We wouldn't have any free will. Ultimately, we'd just be tap dancing to whatever the chemicals in our brains made us do. That's what those "evil" rapists do, right?

 

Ultimately everyone IS tap dancing to chemicals in our brains.  That's how our brains work.  It's science - synapses firing. That's it.  There's no independent consciousness separate from the synapses.  

 

If it was god-created why are there people who do get high off of murder?  He could just make everyone think exactly what he wants.  Why did the Uvalde shooter do what he did while god sat by and either couldn't stop or (worse) could but chose not to?  Is that a moral god?

[Guest]

16 hours ago, rkbabang said:

 

 

You don't understand evolution very well.  It isn't by sheer chance that we don't get high off of murder or rape.  If wiring us that way gave us an advantage that's the way we'd be, the fact that most of us aren't wired that way tells me that having the moral compass we have is what gave us a survival advantage.  There is nothing in the universe that cares about humans, except for humans.

 

 

I didn't phrase that very well, sorry. I mean that it's by sheer chance that Person X ended up with "rape is fun chemicals" in the brain instead of Person Y. It could have easily been Person Y. But it was just Person X instead of Y by sheer chance. The person that gets a high off of rape cannot help it anymore than Buffett on cheap stocks.

[Guest]

9 hours ago, dwy000 said:

I have no idea what this has to do with the discussion, but no, absolutely not - as long as they own the business it's their right to make that decision.  If you're an employee, you do lots of things you don't necessarily agree with all the time because that's part of the job.  

 

 

You said "We demand evidence of god because religious people want us to adhere to their rules based on something we don't believe in.  "

 

Well, certain groups feel that their values are the "right" ones and want to force others to follow. Is that not what's happening in this case? There is no evidence that there is a "right" way to live or a "wrong" way, correct? But non-religious people want us to adhere to their (arbitrary) rules. 

[dwy000]

16 minutes ago, stahleyp said:

 

 

You said "We demand evidence of god because religious people want us to adhere to their rules based on something we don't believe in.  "

 

Well, certain groups feel that their values are the "right" ones and want to force others to follow. Is that not what's happening in this case? There is no evidence that there is a "right" way to live or a "wrong" way, correct? But non-religious people want us to adhere to their (arbitrary) rules. 

Everyone feels their values are the right ones. They wouldn't be your values otherwise.

 

Are you serious?  You look at abortion, gay marriage, drag shows, divorce, etc etc etc and it is the religious ones trying to get people to adhere to their arbitrary rules!!!  Tell the women in Iran that religion doesn't impact their freedom.  Pot meet the world's biggest kettle!

[nafregnum]

17 hours ago, stahleyp said:

With Job, the first time I went through it I did not think it was literal history.

 

Consider yourself lucky then.  You were not an impressionable child who was taught that Job was a real historical figure, as I was.  Job was a historical figure in my religious upbringing and not one single adult ever hinted that they saw it otherwise.  Why?  As best I can tell, it's because they really liked the verse where Job seems to imply that he knows about future Jesus when he says "I know that my redeemer lives" in Job 19:25-27 ... anything in the Old Testament stories that could be cherry picked and pushed into service as a Jesus prophecy had to be real history, all the way back to Adam and Eve who were commanded to offer sacrifices, because the sacrifices were a type and shadow of Christ's future sacrifice which was going to end all sacrifice the the shedding of blood.  In my upbringing, it was literal history all the way back to "in the beginning" ... Later in life, in my mid twenties, the literalism slowly began to crumble away.  I felt cheated and let down by hundreds of adults in my tradition who I thought should've been able to fight their way out of an intellectual paper bag.  Now, many years later, I don't blame them so harshly.  They were all just following their biological imperatives to survive and thrive as members of a group:

 

The Asch conformity experiments show that it is very hard to disagree with a room full of people who all "see" that line A is longer than line B ... how much harder would it be for people to disagree with a much larger group consensus (all my family and friends were in the same faith) when dealing with questions about things you can't even see and measure.  The "spirit" moves through a congregation.  The few dozen people before you cry out "I feel it!" and now it's your turn to testify but you didn't feel anything.  A lot of brain chemicals related to group survival are making you feel like fitting in with your people is a life or death choice, because way back on the Savannah it really was life or death whether you fit in with your group.  That's why being alone triggers stress hormones.  They're telling a person "You're alone.  You might be attacked and killed out here."

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

 

17 hours ago, stahleyp said:

So my basic premise is that morality stems from God or evolution. If evolution is the source, morality is ultimately, just an evolutionary instinct. Many of those instincts helped us survive in the past but go against our best interest now. Look at the fear instinct near market bottoms or the hunger for fat and sugar instinct. In modern times, if one blindly follows those, they'll be far poorer and more unhealthy than if they choose to override them.

 

I'd suggest a slight reformulation: Evolution provided the "starter pack" for our moral sentiments, before we had spoken language.  After we had spoken language, we gained our superpower, the ability to "transcend" the biological programming by enabling us to make over-the-air software updates (moral innovations) ... culminating many thousands of years later in our current idea of human rights.

 

Evolution provided many species of social animals with drives and instincts which enable them to act in coordinated ways so that they began to "succeed as a group" ... Millions of years ago, before humans with spoken language, there was the subconscious mind: this incredible biochemical computer, fine tuning itself through seemingly infinite small experiments to find the optimal formula for success within each group species in each external context.  Chimpanzees evolved in an area that didn't have limitless calories to eat, so the optimal formula for them was to form male war parties to patrol territory and use violence against other groups to expand their territory and acquire new resources (more fig trees) ... In contrast, the Bonobo apes (extremely similar to Chimps) evolved in an environment that had an abundance of calories.  ChatGPT can describe their behavioral differences better than I can:

 

 

17 hours ago, stahleyp said:

So, back to the morality instinct. Why follow it when it goes against our best interest? Giving to charity hurts us by giving our resources to a rival. Is that smart? You can say the same thing about helping someone drowning. You are risking your resources (ie life) to help a rival.

 

I don't give charity to groups that I see as enemies to me or my groups, because it doesn't feel good to do that.  The charity I give comes from my super-abundance, so I'm not risking my survival or the survival of my family by giving it. 

 

The fundamental unit of evolutionary competition is not the animal or the group, but the gene.  Each gene is "competing" to be the most copied in future generations.  Zoom out to the level of looking at us as groups and you can see that the animals which defend their own group members have a genetic advantage.  

 

Cue the story where one biologist (J.B.S. Haldane) does some calculations on the back of an envelope and announced to his friends that "he was prepared to lay down his life for eight cousins or two brothers."

 

 

 

 

17 hours ago, stahleyp said:

If God is the source, then making these decisions can make sense because morality is bigger than us. There is a moral code we "ought" to follow even if we'd prefer not to. It makes sense to help someone drowning or give to charity because they like each of us, are image bearers of God - not simply sacks of skin and bones flying on a rock in space.

 

The gene is the only unit of survival that makes it to the next round.  The living organisms of today will all die and their survival into the future is represented by the genes that got copied into tomorrow's living organisms.  Morality is a part of the many strategies that provide an "edge" in this relentless competition between genes to be copied into the future.

 

I really like something Neal Postman once wrote: "Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see."

 

17 hours ago, stahleyp said:

 

Someone mentioned "progress" and how that's tied to morality. Who determines "progress" though? The Nazis had their version. What's wrong with wanting to toss out poor genetic material, after all?

 

If the Nazis won, wouldn't we all be admiring Hitler for saving the world from diseases, competitors or whatever else?

 

Progress from my human point of view is human flourishing and well-being.  Progress from the planet's point of view might be a giant asteroid to wipe most of us out.  

 

If the Nazis won, I tend to hope that "Sic Semper Tyrannis" would soon have cured (killed) them one way or another.  Just like when Chimps have overly domineering alphas, coalitions eventually get formed to do away with rotten bastards.  

[Guest]

9 hours ago, dwy000 said:

Ultimately everyone IS tap dancing to chemicals in our brains.  That's how our brains work.  It's science - synapses firing. That's it.  There's no independent consciousness separate from the synapses.  

 

If it was god-created why are there people who do get high off of murder?  He could just make everyone think exactly what he wants.  Why did the Uvalde shooter do what he did while god sat by and either couldn't stop or (worse) could but chose not to?  Is that a moral god?

 

I believe that we have free will. Essentially, we can override those brain chemicals since we have souls. 

 

The Uvalde shooter did want he did because he wanted to. We have free will after all. 

 

Hypothetically, if God's love is infinite and our time and suffering here is finite, wouldn't God love erases all wounds? Not to minimize anyone suffering but a couple years ago my daughter (then 3 or 4) fell and scrapped her knee. She screamed and cried like it was the worst thing ever. I knew she would heal and forget all about it. The difference between my daughter and I is far, far less than the difference between God and man. 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, dwy000 said:

Everyone feels their values are the right ones. They wouldn't be your values otherwise.

 

Are you serious?  You look at abortion, gay marriage, drag shows, divorce, etc etc etc and it is the religious ones trying to get people to adhere to their arbitrary rules!!!  Tell the women in Iran that religion doesn't impact their freedom.  Pot meet the world's biggest kettle!

 

Yeah, but atheist values have zero standing in reality and cannot be correct. Theirs can only be an opinion of what is "correct." If we really are, ultimately, just sacks of skin and bones flying sitting on a rock flying through space, how could any values be "correct"? 

[Guest]

13 minutes ago, nafregnum said:

 

Consider yourself lucky then.  You were not an impressionable child who was taught that Job was a real historical figure, as I was.  Job was a historical figure in my religious upbringing and not one single adult ever hinted that they saw it otherwise.  Why?  As best I can tell, it's because they really liked the verse where Job seems to imply that he knows about future Jesus when he says "I know that my redeemer lives" in Job 19:25-27 ... anything in the Old Testament stories that could be cherry picked and pushed into service as a Jesus prophecy had to be real history, all the way back to Adam and Eve who were commanded to offer sacrifices, because the sacrifices were a type and shadow of Christ's future sacrifice which was going to end all sacrifice the the shedding of blood.  In my upbringing, it was literal history all the way back to "in the beginning" ... Later in life, in my mid twenties, the literalism slowly began to crumble away.  I felt cheated and let down by hundreds of adults in my tradition who I thought should've been able to fight their way out of an intellectual paper bag.  Now, many years later, I don't blame them so harshly.  They were all just following their biological imperatives to survive and thrive as members of a group:

 

The Asch conformity experiments show that it is very hard to disagree with a room full of people who all "see" that line A is longer than line B ... how much harder would it be for people to disagree with a much larger group consensus (all my family and friends were in the same faith) when dealing with questions about things you can't even see and measure.  The "spirit" moves through a congregation.  The few dozen people before you cry out "I feel it!" and now it's your turn to testify but you didn't feel anything.  A lot of brain chemicals related to group survival are making you feel like fitting in with your people is a life or death choice, because way back on the Savannah it really was life or death whether you fit in with your group.  That's why being alone triggers stress hormones.  They're telling a person "You're alone.  You might be attacked and killed out here."

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

 

 

I'd suggest a slight reformulation: Evolution provided the "starter pack" for our moral sentiments, before we had spoken language.  After we had spoken language, we gained our superpower, the ability to "transcend" the biological programming by enabling us to make over-the-air software updates (moral innovations) ... culminating many thousands of years later in our current idea of human rights.

 

Evolution provided many species of social animals with drives and instincts which enable them to act in coordinated ways so that they began to "succeed as a group" ... Millions of years ago, before humans with spoken language, there was the subconscious mind: this incredible biochemical computer, fine tuning itself through seemingly infinite small experiments to find the optimal formula for success within each group species in each external context.  Chimpanzees evolved in an area that didn't have limitless calories to eat, so the optimal formula for them was to form male war parties to patrol territory and use violence against other groups to expand their territory and acquire new resources (more fig trees) ... In contrast, the Bonobo apes (extremely similar to Chimps) evolved in an environment that had an abundance of calories.  ChatGPT can describe their behavioral differences better than I can:

 

 

 

I don't give charity to groups that I see as enemies to me or my groups, because it doesn't feel good to do that.  The charity I give comes from my super-abundance, so I'm not risking my survival or the survival of my family by giving it. 

 

The fundamental unit of evolutionary competition is not the animal or the group, but the gene.  Each gene is "competing" to be the most copied in future generations.  Zoom out to the level of looking at us as groups and you can see that the animals which defend their own group members have a genetic advantage.  

 

Cue the story where one biologist (J.B.S. Haldane) does some calculations on the back of an envelope and announced to his friends that "he was prepared to lay down his life for eight cousins or two brothers."

 

 

 

 

 

The gene is the only unit of survival that makes it to the next round.  The living organisms of today will all die and their survival into the future is represented by the genes that got copied into tomorrow's living organisms.  Morality is a part of the many strategies that provide an "edge" in this relentless competition between genes to be copied into the future.

 

I really like something Neal Postman once wrote: "Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see."

 

 

Progress from my human point of view is human flourishing and well-being.  Progress from the planet's point of view might be a giant asteroid to wipe most of us out.  

 

If the Nazis won, I tend to hope that "Sic Semper Tyrannis" would soon have cured (killed) them one way or another.  Just like when Chimps have overly domineering alphas, coalitions eventually get formed to do away with rotten bastards.  

 

So do you believe gene survival is our only true purpose?

 

Also, how does one define human flourishing and well-being? Plenty of people say that but I do not know what it very vague and can literally mean just about anything. 

[Guest]

On 3/8/2023 at 8:48 PM, RichardGibbons said:

Tablets from a mountain doesn't solve the morality issue because one can't know God and because even if we could, God asserting something doesn't make it moral.

 

(Heck, if you must base your morality on rules from a higher-power, I think all morality should simply be defined as "whatever RichardGibbons says is moral." That's actually a more solid foundation for morality than a God--after all, it's much easier to believe that I exist, and you can even often get answers from me when you ask questions. And if you don't believe I'm a higher power, one worthy of delivering moral laws, I think that's just because you need to have more faith.)

 

Rather I think the most likely explanation is that morality is derived in the same sort of way that Math is. i.e. once you can count items, everything naturally follows, from addition and subtraction to differential equations.  Similarly, once you have groups of people, you need morality or else your society won't be stable. That's why at the core, most of the moral rules are the same between societies (e.g. generally, capriciously murdering other people in your society is discouraged.  And basically the edge-cases of morality seem to revolve around defining whether or not certain people are part of your society.)

 

I do not believe God "asserts" morality but rather an attribute of God is morality. In other words, goodness cannot exist without God - only our opinion what is "good". And that, literally, could be anything. Nazis can be "good" as can sexualizing a child. 

 

If morality is like math, how can we we violate them? Isn't the moral standards of today far, far different than say Ancient Rome? Why is that?

[DooDiligence]

11 hours ago, dwy000 said:

I have no idea what this has to do with the discussion, but no, absolutely not - as long as they own the business it's their right to make that decision.  If you're an employee, you do lots of things you don't necessarily agree with all the time because that's part of the job.  

 

People can also be coerced into doing things they would ordinarily not do as per the Milgram Shock and Stanford Prison experiments.

Edited March 10, 2023 by DooDiligence

[rkbabang]

2 hours ago, stahleyp said:

 

I didn't phrase that very well, sorry. I mean that it's by sheer chance that Person X ended up with "rape is fun chemicals" in the brain instead of Person Y. It could have easily been Person Y. But it was just Person X instead of Y by sheer chance. The person that gets a high off of rape cannot help it anymore than Buffett on cheap stocks.

 

 

Yes, what is your point?  You could have been born a conjoined twin or with a cleft lip, or with a love of rape and murder.  It IS pretty random.  You inherit half your genes from your mother's side and half from your father's, but the specific genes you have from each is pretty much luck of the draw.  Then there is random mutations of which we all have some (some more than others) which is also just random.    So yes, you could have been randomly born without a sense of empathy and be someone who enjoys killing others.  This only bothers you because it isn't how you were born, if you were born that way it wouldn't bother you at all.

 

[dwy000]

46 minutes ago, stahleyp said:

 

Yeah, but atheist values have zero standing in reality and cannot be correct. Theirs can only be an opinion of what is "correct." If we really are, ultimately, just sacks of skin and bones flying sitting on a rock flying through space, how could any values be "correct"? 

They are correct because we believe them to be correct! There is no definitive "correct" view.  Yours are just opinions as well.  The difference is I came about mine through independent thought and yours were dictated to you by followers of an imaginary thing. 

[dwy000]

30 minutes ago, DooDiligence said:

 

People can also be coerced into doing things they would ordinarily not do as per the Milgram Shock and Stanford Prison experiments.

This is true. Just look at religion. There aren't a lot of atheist suicide bombers. 

[dwy000]

1 hour ago, stahleyp said:

 

I believe that we have free will. Essentially, we can override those brain chemicals since we have souls. 

 

The Uvalde shooter did want he did because he wanted to. We have free will after all. 

 

Hypothetically, if God's love is infinite and our time and suffering here is finite, wouldn't God love erases all wounds? Not to minimize anyone suffering but a couple years ago my daughter (then 3 or 4) fell and scrapped her knee. She screamed and cried like it was the worst thing ever. I knew she would heal and forget all about it. The difference between my daughter and I is far, far less than the difference between God and man. 

This is just plain wrong. You do not have free will that can override the synapse firing. Those synapse firing ARE your free will.

 

Are you actually arguing that it's okay for a god with infinite love to ignore the massacre of innocent children because "hey, it will all even out in the end"?  Seriously, is that your argument?

Edited March 10, 2023 by dwy000

[DooDiligence]

Sweating while having flashbacks from Intro to Philosophy.

 

My big takeaway from that course was learning to adhere to the Intellectual Code of Conduct (linked before).

 

I still succumb to logical fallacies.

 

Watching my Mom (dialysis patient), go into horrible personality swings when her electrolytes got off (potassium is a huge culprit), also helped hammer home the lessons from Intro to Psychology and Biology regarding chemicals and their effects on us. Anyone ever been hangry?