Where did I say anything about genetic memory? I'm talking cultural memory. And morality, as I said and these experiments confirm, is a feeling, created by an analogue circuit in the brain. We can and do determine what is moral, by our standards, which are the only ones that matter.
Morality is an emergent phenomenon of the brain, so it is disrupted too. The important thing to remember here is that the experimenters pointed the magnets at a certain place, expecting that to result in moral changes, based on what we theorize about brain structure. And they were right.
"How can magnets impact my moral choices? Isn't my soul supposed to do that?"
Humans have known for a large part of their history that certain chemicals and diseases can affect the behaviour of humans. Now we know magnets can do that, too. It's a great find in a scientific sense, but it doesn't really pose any new moral questions that haven't been asked before. Replace "magnets" in your question with alcohol, drugs, brain diseases or medication and you might see that people have been asking the same question ever since religion was invented.
And they haven't come up with a satisfactory answer yet. Of course we could replace magnets with any number of other environmental influences and ask the same questions. That's kind of my point.
We have neural hardware for morality. We manipulated it with magnets. Some of it, at least, was basically where we thought it would be.
We have a sense of justice, fairness, and reciprocity. We have empathy. Well, most of us have these things because it is genetically advantageous to have them, even if a few of our species don't. Justice, fairness, and reciprocity work, species that have a sense of these things have an advantage, they can work together and learn from each other.
Oh, and what you wrote. On the same page now, I think. Society needs to acknowledge and encourage the moral sense that most of us have, while explaining logically why doing these things benefits even a completely selfish individual to those who don't have the innate senses.
I believe that we have two basic psychological modes, the feast mode and the famine mode. Based on game theory and economic experiments, it seems that most people will try to be fair and equitable with others even when it costs them nothing to be completely selfish. And most people will instinctively punish unfairness in others, even if that hurts them dearly in the game. The experimental games I'm thinking of were played in poor regions, for the equivalent of months worth of salary.
But if everyone around them is being unfair, and unfairness can not be punished, most people will resort to being unfair and selfish themselves. Most people. Just as we have a few sociopaths, who can not help being selfish, we have people who can not help being fair, equitable, and good. Slightly more of them than the selfish type, if I remember correctly.
Some theorists speculate that after we settled down and started farming for the first time, climate change hit us in a big way. Before, the psychological impact of such an event would be minimized as groups migrated from affected areas more easily, and the resulting population pressures were dissipated through low level endemic warfare, which is in some ways more of an extreme sport, gaining the winners a wife and a place in society, and the losers a life with less optimistic chances and perhaps some disfiguring or even crippling injury. Death was rare, but it didn't need to be common to reduce population pressures enough.
After we settled down and started farming, things were different when climate change hit. Whole advanced and specialized societies stayed until their surpluses ran out, and then descended on their more fortunate neighbors with organized desperation. And famine causes birth defects, no myelin sheaths for the babies. At least a generation of brain damaged kids was raised by severely PTSD parents. And thus, famine mode was locked into our brains. Everybody grows up starving for something, to this very day. Or so the theory goes.
And so we have a society where everybody grows up feeling desperate and selfish, to some extent. Which makes being selfish the only logical option unless the majority of people suddenly decide to play nice again. The cure seems to be gorging ourselves until we're convinced we're not starving anymore. Let's hope the planet can take that.
Sure, but asshole doesn't quite convey the fundamental weakness I've seen here. All our bad words for weak, needy, and desperate seem to involve women or gays, which isn't really fair. And this guy is a weak, needy, desperate asshole. Which is too fucking long.
Do we have any Yiddish speakers here? What's the opposite of mensch? An animal, a desperate, starving animal. That's the kind of word I'm looking for.
Right, well, that's the problem, isn't it? I'm just evil from birth in your religion, and nothing I can possibly do can make up for that except begging forgiveness from the guy who set me up to fail.
Loss is built into the conservation laws of thermodynamics.
If you could trivially undo your choices (undo a choice at zero energy cost), would a choice really have meaning? By all accounts, the universe seems to be constructed so that nothing can be undone with zero energy cost.
Have you considered the possibility that this is the only way the game can be rigged without making it a rote development of fate? Have you considered the possibility that error makes us free?
Yes, I've considered those things, but then I thought to myself, time's directional arrow does not apply to the laws of physics as we understand them, they run in reverse just as well as they do forward. Why do we see things in terms of time anyhow?
Because we are just frames in a movie. It wouldn't even matter what order the frames were shot in, we would have to experience them in this particular order because we aren't outside, watching.
We really have no way of knowing, from inside the movie, what exactly it is or how it works. We can't know if it is predetermined or not.
In any case, your argument is flawed. Plenty of things can be undone with zero energy cost. Look up the word adiabatic. Conservation laws are derived, rather than fundamental laws, and they really only deal with static states, moments in time, not continual flow.
We don't know if the universe is predetermined or not. Certainly, our best theories say it is. The quantum wave function is deterministic. But we don't know, and we can't, for certain.
I was trying to convey something about our mental models of the universe, rather than the unknowable itself. If it's turtles all the way down, what does that mean for our ideas of self, free will, the soul, good and evil, and so forth in that vein.
Some people find a mental map of the world that they like and choose to look no further, taking it on faith that their map is 'true.' If it's turtles all the way down, there is no truth but that. And this, right here right now. Which means we should keep looking at this, and comparing our mental maps to this, and not take anything on faith.
It means that to me, anyhow.
So, this experiment seems to show that fundamental parts of what we conceive of as ourselves can be altered by external stimuli. No big news to anyone who follows the cognitive sciences. Heck, we can point that thing at another part of your head and make you see God. So what? Well, it means that what we think of as 'self' is not a thing unto itself, a separate actor walking volitionally across an impassive stage of a universe.
And if we are not willing ourselves around a universe that exists simply as a stage, a backdrop for other selfish actors, then we are not what most of us seem to think we are. If we are not separate, then how are we different from an avalanche or a hurricane? What is volition if it is only a conditioned thing? What is will if it only exists due to the causes and conditions that create and support it? If will is not a separate thing, then what most of us think when they think 'me' is just plain wrong.
Heck, if it's turtles all the way down, then will and self are also turtles all the way down. We are not riding on the backs of turtles, we're just more turtles. It may well be turtles all the way up, too. But we are the top turtles I've seen, and I've looked.
When I speak of philosophical usefulness, I'm trying to express an idea about thinking itself. In our lives we encounter many concepts and ideas and we put together a mental map of the world. We need to continually evaluate our own mental maps. We need to look at our ideas, how consistent they are with each other and reality as we perceive it. That is what 'philosophical usefulness' means to me.
I try not to judge IRL but I just realized, Slashdot is my guilty little outlet for being judgmental. Damn it, that means I'm going to have to be nicer to all you fucks.
"Complete Justice" is just a hack, too. Another ego rationalization, a philosophically bankrupt concept. You want justice? You better start making it, right here and now, because there's no guy in the sky to make it all right in the bye and bye.
Justice is just another feeling. We have it because we are social creatures and it is genetically advantageous for us to have a sense of it. Because justice, fairness, and reciprocity work better than their opposites. But justice does not exist outside our mental constructs.
That's my theory, anyhow. I'll probably have to refine or even change it completely as I get hold of new information, but it's the best I've got right now.
In the hypothetical example, the person has crossed the bridge, so in a simplistic moral sense, there is no risk. Risk only applies to future events. The test subject is unable to put themselves in other people's shoes, to see that there was a risk from their perspective.
But perhaps that indicates a failure to imagine oneself in the past. Then again, aren't these all still examples of different types of failures of moral reasoning? There were more examples given, as well, this wasn't the only question asked.
Could you... could you do something for me? A quick little favor? Could you just say, 'And I would have gotten away with it, too, if not for that meddling PJ,' while you take the mask off?"
but then I thought, fuck that, that's too subtle for this bitch.
And I'm not using that word to denigrate strong, opinionated women, either. PJs the kind of bitch this bitch wishes he was.
God damn it, how do you say a guy is a pansy.. no, a pussy... no, a simpering milquetoast... fuck! How do you say it without insulting women or gays?
Right, well, that's the problem, isn't it? I'm just evil from birth in your religion, and nothing I can possibly do can make up for that except begging forgiveness from the guy who set me up to fail.
Yes, I'm illustrating the thought process of the magnetized subjects. I thought that was obvious from the context one line below where I say "I'd call that a failure of moral reasoning."
Frankly, that's repugnant to me. The God of Christianity strikes me as evil. If he exists, I'm afraid I'm going to have to refuse to have anything to do with him. I'll suffer my eternal punishment in silence, because I don't deal with FUCKING TERRORISTS, okay?
The soul is considered to be the primary causative agent of the self. If it is not, in fact, a primary cause but just a loosely coupled factor, then what is the purpose of a soul? It causes nothing with any certainty, and therefore it will not accrue merit or demerit and should not be judged. Philosophically, what is it for?
What if crime is cause by a feature in the hardware exploited by a bug in the software?
In any case, I agree completely, we can create a workable moral framework that does not spring from any idealistic abstractions, but from an understanding of cause and effect.
You've just outlined my current nondualist hypothesis: things such as ego, id, mind, and soul are emergent properties of the complex interactions of substrates such as neurons, atoms, and ferengi bartenders.
Re:Seven years for eight hours work
on
Novell Wins vs. SCO
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Who the fuck cares what you say or what your lame ass rationale is? You're an SCO shill because I say you are, bitch.
You misunderstood the premise. If you knew a bridge was unsafe, would it be moral to let your child walk across it? What if you let your child walk across, knowing full well they could fall to their death, but they did not fall? Was that immoral, even though no harm came of it this particular time?
This was one of the experimental questions asked. Magnetized people thought the choice was moral because the child was not harmed. Non magnetized people tended to look at the potential for harm and decide that it was immoral.
In my opinion, there is no such thing as absolute morality. For any given scope, there is an absolute morality, but there is always a larger scope.
The idea of merit and demerit, good and evil, come from the belief in a self that is essentially separate from reality. If reality is divided, it can get out of balance. But we naturally desire fairness and balance, that is genetically advantageous for the species. So, we invent myths that restore balance, in our own heads at least. But it does not solve the initial problem of dualistic, self oriented thinking.
That problem can only be solved by letting go of false duality and realizing there is no self in here, nor a universe out there because there is no in here and out there, and 'self' and 'universe' both are just concepts or arbitrary labels.
We do not need the concepts of self, good, and evil to have a moral society. In fact, because they are false concepts, they do not do what they purport to do, in fact, they create just the opposite of a moral society.
To put it into Christian terms, when we operate under the influence of false concepts like good, evil, the self, and free will, we have eaten the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and attempted to usurp God's place. It is not our place to judge because we are not omniscient. But that is what we do, to our self and to everything in God's creation, every day of our lives, unless we learn to live without self.
Conviction is a feeling, it does not come from logic, it drives logic to find supporting evidence and spin a plausible story.
A determinist knows they are part of an unending chain of cause and effect, and the cause of 'communicating an opinion' can have the effect of 'convincing someone of something.'
The mind seeks to create a logical and self consistent story for our actions. If a random magnetic impulse can change my mind, and my mind is primed to create a self consistent story about itself, of course it would interpret that random impulse as originating inside itself. So, how can I know it was me that made any of my decisions?
Re:Seven years for eight hours work
on
Novell Wins vs. SCO
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Which is exactly why the AC called Frosty Piss on his bullshit, and why I was backing him up. Get it? You just argued against Frosty's original argument. He called PJ a shill.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did I say anything about genetic memory? I'm talking cultural memory. And morality, as I said and these experiments confirm, is a feeling, created by an analogue circuit in the brain. We can and do determine what is moral, by our standards, which are the only ones that matter.
Morality is an emergent phenomenon of the brain, so it is disrupted too. The important thing to remember here is that the experimenters pointed the magnets at a certain place, expecting that to result in moral changes, based on what we theorize about brain structure. And they were right.
"How can magnets impact my moral choices? Isn't my soul supposed to do that?"
Humans have known for a large part of their history that certain chemicals and diseases can affect the behaviour of humans. Now we know magnets can do that, too. It's a great find in a scientific sense, but it doesn't really pose any new moral questions that haven't been asked before. Replace "magnets" in your question with alcohol, drugs, brain diseases or medication and you might see that people have been asking the same question ever since religion was invented.
And they haven't come up with a satisfactory answer yet. Of course we could replace magnets with any number of other environmental influences and ask the same questions. That's kind of my point.
We have neural hardware for morality. We manipulated it with magnets. Some of it, at least, was basically where we thought it would be.
We have a sense of justice, fairness, and reciprocity. We have empathy. Well, most of us have these things because it is genetically advantageous to have them, even if a few of our species don't. Justice, fairness, and reciprocity work, species that have a sense of these things have an advantage, they can work together and learn from each other.
Oh, and what you wrote. On the same page now, I think. Society needs to acknowledge and encourage the moral sense that most of us have, while explaining logically why doing these things benefits even a completely selfish individual to those who don't have the innate senses.
I believe that we have two basic psychological modes, the feast mode and the famine mode. Based on game theory and economic experiments, it seems that most people will try to be fair and equitable with others even when it costs them nothing to be completely selfish. And most people will instinctively punish unfairness in others, even if that hurts them dearly in the game. The experimental games I'm thinking of were played in poor regions, for the equivalent of months worth of salary.
But if everyone around them is being unfair, and unfairness can not be punished, most people will resort to being unfair and selfish themselves. Most people. Just as we have a few sociopaths, who can not help being selfish, we have people who can not help being fair, equitable, and good. Slightly more of them than the selfish type, if I remember correctly.
Some theorists speculate that after we settled down and started farming for the first time, climate change hit us in a big way. Before, the psychological impact of such an event would be minimized as groups migrated from affected areas more easily, and the resulting population pressures were dissipated through low level endemic warfare, which is in some ways more of an extreme sport, gaining the winners a wife and a place in society, and the losers a life with less optimistic chances and perhaps some disfiguring or even crippling injury. Death was rare, but it didn't need to be common to reduce population pressures enough.
After we settled down and started farming, things were different when climate change hit. Whole advanced and specialized societies stayed until their surpluses ran out, and then descended on their more fortunate neighbors with organized desperation. And famine causes birth defects, no myelin sheaths for the babies. At least a generation of brain damaged kids was raised by severely PTSD parents. And thus, famine mode was locked into our brains. Everybody grows up starving for something, to this very day. Or so the theory goes.
And so we have a society where everybody grows up feeling desperate and selfish, to some extent. Which makes being selfish the only logical option unless the majority of people suddenly decide to play nice again. The cure seems to be gorging ourselves until we're convinced we're not starving anymore. Let's hope the planet can take that.
It's more, if you exist, and if you are actually anything like these clowns say you are, fuck you.
Sure, but asshole doesn't quite convey the fundamental weakness I've seen here. All our bad words for weak, needy, and desperate seem to involve women or gays, which isn't really fair. And this guy is a weak, needy, desperate asshole. Which is too fucking long.
Do we have any Yiddish speakers here? What's the opposite of mensch? An animal, a desperate, starving animal. That's the kind of word I'm looking for.
Right, well, that's the problem, isn't it? I'm just evil from birth in your religion, and nothing I can possibly do can make up for that except begging forgiveness from the guy who set me up to fail.
Loss is built into the conservation laws of thermodynamics.
If you could trivially undo your choices (undo a choice at zero energy cost), would a choice really have meaning? By all accounts, the universe seems to be constructed so that nothing can be undone with zero energy cost.
Have you considered the possibility that this is the only way the game can be rigged without making it a rote development of fate? Have you considered the possibility that error makes us free?
Yes, I've considered those things, but then I thought to myself, time's directional arrow does not apply to the laws of physics as we understand them, they run in reverse just as well as they do forward. Why do we see things in terms of time anyhow?
Because we are just frames in a movie. It wouldn't even matter what order the frames were shot in, we would have to experience them in this particular order because we aren't outside, watching.
We really have no way of knowing, from inside the movie, what exactly it is or how it works. We can't know if it is predetermined or not.
In any case, your argument is flawed. Plenty of things can be undone with zero energy cost. Look up the word adiabatic. Conservation laws are derived, rather than fundamental laws, and they really only deal with static states, moments in time, not continual flow.
We don't know if the universe is predetermined or not. Certainly, our best theories say it is. The quantum wave function is deterministic. But we don't know, and we can't, for certain.
I was trying to convey something about our mental models of the universe, rather than the unknowable itself. If it's turtles all the way down, what does that mean for our ideas of self, free will, the soul, good and evil, and so forth in that vein.
Some people find a mental map of the world that they like and choose to look no further, taking it on faith that their map is 'true.' If it's turtles all the way down, there is no truth but that. And this, right here right now. Which means we should keep looking at this, and comparing our mental maps to this, and not take anything on faith.
It means that to me, anyhow.
So, this experiment seems to show that fundamental parts of what we conceive of as ourselves can be altered by external stimuli. No big news to anyone who follows the cognitive sciences. Heck, we can point that thing at another part of your head and make you see God. So what? Well, it means that what we think of as 'self' is not a thing unto itself, a separate actor walking volitionally across an impassive stage of a universe.
And if we are not willing ourselves around a universe that exists simply as a stage, a backdrop for other selfish actors, then we are not what most of us seem to think we are. If we are not separate, then how are we different from an avalanche or a hurricane? What is volition if it is only a conditioned thing? What is will if it only exists due to the causes and conditions that create and support it? If will is not a separate thing, then what most of us think when they think 'me' is just plain wrong.
Heck, if it's turtles all the way down, then will and self are also turtles all the way down. We are not riding on the backs of turtles, we're just more turtles. It may well be turtles all the way up, too. But we are the top turtles I've seen, and I've looked.
When I speak of philosophical usefulness, I'm trying to express an idea about thinking itself. In our lives we encounter many concepts and ideas and we put together a mental map of the world. We need to continually evaluate our own mental maps. We need to look at our ideas, how consistent they are with each other and reality as we perceive it. That is what 'philosophical usefulness' means to me.
I try not to judge IRL but I just realized, Slashdot is my guilty little outlet for being judgmental. Damn it, that means I'm going to have to be nicer to all you fucks.
"Complete Justice" is just a hack, too. Another ego rationalization, a philosophically bankrupt concept. You want justice? You better start making it, right here and now, because there's no guy in the sky to make it all right in the bye and bye.
Justice is just another feeling. We have it because we are social creatures and it is genetically advantageous for us to have a sense of it. Because justice, fairness, and reciprocity work better than their opposites. But justice does not exist outside our mental constructs.
That's my theory, anyhow. I'll probably have to refine or even change it completely as I get hold of new information, but it's the best I've got right now.
In the hypothetical example, the person has crossed the bridge, so in a simplistic moral sense, there is no risk. Risk only applies to future events. The test subject is unable to put themselves in other people's shoes, to see that there was a risk from their perspective.
But perhaps that indicates a failure to imagine oneself in the past. Then again, aren't these all still examples of different types of failures of moral reasoning? There were more examples given, as well, this wasn't the only question asked.
So now there is a loophole for the believers....
And a good business idea for the smart..
Start selling Supper Magnet Tin Foil Hats, which will insure that the Soul (TM) would stay clean while the wearer can screw the world...
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. I found a place where the context of that quote has relevance to the discussion. I believe you all owe me an internet now.
My reply was actually going to be
Could you... could you do something for me? A quick little favor? Could you just say, 'And I would have gotten away with it, too, if not for that meddling PJ,' while you take the mask off?"
but then I thought, fuck that, that's too subtle for this bitch.
And I'm not using that word to denigrate strong, opinionated women, either. PJs the kind of bitch this bitch wishes he was.
God damn it, how do you say a guy is a pansy.. no, a pussy... no, a simpering milquetoast... fuck! How do you say it without insulting women or gays?
Right, well, that's the problem, isn't it? I'm just evil from birth in your religion, and nothing I can possibly do can make up for that except begging forgiveness from the guy who set me up to fail.
Yes, I'm illustrating the thought process of the magnetized subjects. I thought that was obvious from the context one line below where I say "I'd call that a failure of moral reasoning."
Frankly, that's repugnant to me. The God of Christianity strikes me as evil. If he exists, I'm afraid I'm going to have to refuse to have anything to do with him. I'll suffer my eternal punishment in silence, because I don't deal with FUCKING TERRORISTS, okay?
Why, that sounds as silly as an entire planet made up of just one really big river.
And "Wilson" is "Watson." There are many more parallels with the Sherlock Holmes series, according to the creators of "House."
The soul is considered to be the primary causative agent of the self. If it is not, in fact, a primary cause but just a loosely coupled factor, then what is the purpose of a soul? It causes nothing with any certainty, and therefore it will not accrue merit or demerit and should not be judged. Philosophically, what is it for?
What if crime is cause by a feature in the hardware exploited by a bug in the software?
In any case, I agree completely, we can create a workable moral framework that does not spring from any idealistic abstractions, but from an understanding of cause and effect.
You've just outlined my current nondualist hypothesis: things such as ego, id, mind, and soul are emergent properties of the complex interactions of substrates such as neurons, atoms, and ferengi bartenders.
Who the fuck cares what you say or what your lame ass rationale is? You're an SCO shill because I say you are, bitch.
You misunderstood the premise. If you knew a bridge was unsafe, would it be moral to let your child walk across it? What if you let your child walk across, knowing full well they could fall to their death, but they did not fall? Was that immoral, even though no harm came of it this particular time?
This was one of the experimental questions asked. Magnetized people thought the choice was moral because the child was not harmed. Non magnetized people tended to look at the potential for harm and decide that it was immoral.
In my opinion, there is no such thing as absolute morality. For any given scope, there is an absolute morality, but there is always a larger scope.
The idea of merit and demerit, good and evil, come from the belief in a self that is essentially separate from reality. If reality is divided, it can get out of balance. But we naturally desire fairness and balance, that is genetically advantageous for the species. So, we invent myths that restore balance, in our own heads at least. But it does not solve the initial problem of dualistic, self oriented thinking.
That problem can only be solved by letting go of false duality and realizing there is no self in here, nor a universe out there because there is no in here and out there, and 'self' and 'universe' both are just concepts or arbitrary labels.
We do not need the concepts of self, good, and evil to have a moral society. In fact, because they are false concepts, they do not do what they purport to do, in fact, they create just the opposite of a moral society.
To put it into Christian terms, when we operate under the influence of false concepts like good, evil, the self, and free will, we have eaten the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and attempted to usurp God's place. It is not our place to judge because we are not omniscient. But that is what we do, to our self and to everything in God's creation, every day of our lives, unless we learn to live without self.
Conviction is a feeling, it does not come from logic, it drives logic to find supporting evidence and spin a plausible story.
A determinist knows they are part of an unending chain of cause and effect, and the cause of 'communicating an opinion' can have the effect of 'convincing someone of something.'
The mind seeks to create a logical and self consistent story for our actions. If a random magnetic impulse can change my mind, and my mind is primed to create a self consistent story about itself, of course it would interpret that random impulse as originating inside itself. So, how can I know it was me that made any of my decisions?
Which is exactly why the AC called Frosty Piss on his bullshit, and why I was backing him up. Get it? You just argued against Frosty's original argument. He called PJ a shill.