Doom and Castle Wolfenstein (along with Rise of the Triads and some versions of Marathon, among others) all preceded Quake, but they weren't true 3D in the sense of the environments and characters all being rendered on the fly. First Person Shooters before Quake used scaled sprites for the characters, weapon blasts etc, and the environments used scaled and mapped textures to various levels of sophistication. They were more 2.5D than 3D, although some of the ones that came out around the same time as Quake were starting to look pretty good (like Marathon Infinity or Duke Nukem 3D).
I'll assume that you can see that I also would not throw the acid, were I to somehow find myself in that situation. I hope I count as a "real" atheist (I don't carry a card or anything:). I submit that the argument I've previously outlined is rational (in the sense of using reason, rather than following self-interest) and entirely indifferent to the question of belief in deities, so my answer to your first question is "yes" - although I would phrase it as "if an atheist were to choose not to throw the acid, is it possible that they are acting rationally"?
I do agree that there are many real situations where nobody will find out if you commit an immoral (although I prefer to call it an unethical) act, and so your reputation will remain unharmed. My response would be that in practice it is generally impossible to distinguish these situations from the ones where you will get found out. This means that you are better off not behaving unethically at all. I think that this is a goodly part of the reason why we have evolved the capacity for empathy, but I won't go too far into that just now - my posts are getting long enough as it is!
I see two aspects to a belief in God that would have an effect on one's behaviour in this thought experiment. One is that that if you do throw the acid, you might suffer punishment in the afterlife, the other is that throwing the acid is [presumably] not what God wants (ie it's against the divine plan/moral code). I think it is relatively straightforward to see that the first effect is simply a delayed form of punishment, and thus effectively changes the balance of consequences of throwing the acid to a point where it's against your own interests to do so, in spite of the money. The second effect is a little more complex, but I think that it boils down to causing you to have an implicit goal: for your actions to accord with what God wants.
This relates to your second question: "Is belief in god the only reason not to always pursue one's own self-interest at the expense of others?". My answer to this question is a resounding "no"! We have already talked about the social/reputation reasons, which I think that we would agree do apply in many situations. Also, the existence of empathy effectively entangles your own self-interest with the interests of others. But even if we ignore these practical considerations, there are still many ethical systems that do not depend on the existence of a God for their validity.
The difficulty with deriving behavioural codes from divinely revealed principles is that if the rules are contingent (ie it's logically possible that they could have been different), then they are (at least to some degree) arbitrary. If they're not contingent, that means that there are constraints on what God can do. The dilemma is neatly summed up in questions of the form: "could God have chosen to make [insert evil act here] good and [insert good act here] evil"?
Is there an a priori reason not to [act as if our own interests are always more important than those of others]?
I think that there is no a priori reason either way - if we start assuming things we'll always just be question begging. However, I don't see any good reason to presume one's own suffering or pleasure is more important or intense than that of others, and without any good reasons supporting this idea, it's not rational to base your behaviour on it. Of course sometimes your actions must be more directly concerned with your own pleasure/sufffering, simply because people only have direct access to their own preferences/feelings and have a better idea about how different outcomes might affect them. But aside from the portion of self-interest you must use to avoid getting screwed over, I see no reason for anyone to think that they are more important than everyone else on the planet.
Now this is a fairly utilitarian point of view, but in spite of the frequent pejorative use of that term, I am not uncomfortable with it. I simply see suffering in general as bad, whether it be mine or someone else's. This makes outcomes that reduce net suffering a desirable goal, and so it is better to act to avoid or reduce suffering, even if you might forego the odd wad of cash.
For sure! I don't know Quake personally (I'm not into video games at all), but I assume that it's another one of the 3D videogames where your surroundings change with your perspective.
Dude, Quake isn't "another one of the 3D videogames" - it was the first true-3D first person shooter, and it surely rocked.
Just a tiny point though - your surroundings only change if you're not camping.
In Australia I think we would say "the 5th of June" significantly more often than "June the 5th", although you would of course be understood either way. I suspect you might occasionally be accused of "sounding American" if you said it in the month/day fashion.
When writing dates down, we always use day/month/year. To me this makes a lot more sense than month/day/year, as at least the significance of each part is monotonically increasing. Year/month/day would be even better, as it would match regular numbers (like an odometer).
Another post mentioned that the use of "9/11" is confusing when you're used to the day/year convention - I would say that this was true initially, but "9/11" has now been used a lot here (possibly in deference to the way Americans chose to refer to it). These days it pretty much seems like a proper noun, and is routinely used in conversation and the media without a second thought, as is the otherwise slightly unusual "September [the] 11th".
The worm is also a suspect for causing big problems in the communications in the New South Wales (that's the Australian state Sydney's in) train network on Sunday.
You've described a litmus test for determining whether an action is moral. You haven't explained why it's rational to make the moral choice.
I would say I at least attempted to address both of these ideas. That you are obviously unhappy with my attempt doesn't mean I missed the point, and I certainly wasn't trying to be patronising.
I think that the disagreement here hinges at least partly on the meaning of the word "rational".
I was implictly referring to something approaching meaning 3 here. I would infer that you favour a definition of "rational" closer to the one implied by "rational economic man" - something along the lines of always doing whatever will maximise one's own personal gain.
In this "rational economic man" sense of rational, you would by definition do whatever was of most benefit to you. If you use this definition of rational, the original scenario is simply a question begging exercise: this thought experiment is (presumably intentionally) constructed where there is all carrot and no stick involved in throwing acid into someone else's face. So "rational economic man" certainly would throw the acid and take the money. But this does not mean that a real human being, acting rationally (in the sense of using logic and reason) would do so.
You seem to miss the point that even though as an intellectual exercise I can predict the effect of universalizing my own actions, there isn't in fact any mechanism by which my decisions are universalized.
This isn't a point that I've missed - it's something I would actively disagree with. There is a mechanism by which decisions are universalised, and it is the precise reason that the scenario we are discussing is a thought experiment rather than a common real-life situation. People do not exist in a social vacuum where they interact with strangers once and can choose to act in any way they like, free of consequences. The demands of your life often require that you interact with people you've met before, and in all likelihood will meet again. Because interactions are conducted with knowledge of previous behaviour, your reputation is important, and most people who are not psychopaths will cast adverse judgements on those who defect, and will treat them less favourably in the future.
In game theory this is why the iterated prisoner's dilemma is a much better guide to real-world behaviour than the simple prisoner's dilemma.
Being able to see that we would all be better off if we all behave in a way that could be applied universally is a rational reason to behave that way. This is not affected by the fact that in some instances (particularly such as this unrealistic example) universalisable behaviour might not be the best way to maximise our own personal benefit.
What I am getting at is that there is no a priori reason that we should always act as if our own personal interests are always more important than the interests of others. This is what I was talking about when I said "everyone is I/me". In practice of course we are frequently the best defenders of our own interests, but this does not mean that applying logic and reason to the situations we might find ourselves in will always result in disregarding the effect that our actions will have on others.
I always find the weird ant genetic system hard to remember from one time I look it up to the next, but I still don't think it is group selection for the good of the species. For the colony perhaps, but as the workers don't reproduce themselves this is probably not too broadly applicable among non-insects.
Wolves are a good example I hadn't thought of - but even with the alpha male/female pair, the subservient wolves are still related to the breeding pair aren't they?
You are right then that group-selection does sometimes occur - but I'm not convinced it could ever occur for the good of the species at large.
You're right that we don't require a consistent ethical system to live - I would instead suggest that it is rational to prefer that we all live using decent approximations of reasonable ethical systems, and this is good enough reason for us to do so ourselves. You are right that often our main rational reason for not hurting people is that we don't want to be punished - but I would maintain that avoiding punishment is not the only rational reason.
You are also right that empathy helps - although I think that this helps us realise we should be concerned with the needs of others, as I originally suggested. I disagree however that it is a species-preservation technique. The idea that traits which help a whole species survive can be favoured by natural selection is a difficult one to maintain - see here. There are also people without the capacity for empathy - psychopaths.
I also agree that many of our perceived morals are societal constraints or biological impulses - but this does not automatically mean that they are entirely without independent merit.
You speak of civilization, but realize that all successful civilizations have historically been composed of mostly "religious fanatics".
I would argue that the current Western Civilisation, considered at large, is a "successful civilisation" by most measures. While it is probably true that most people in our civilisation are religious, saying that most people within it are fanatics is a bit of a stretch.
Without something to believe in, what reason is there to behave, or to make progress, or to organize civilly?
Plenty. We are all better off, including within the period of our own lifetime, if we agree to act in a civil and ethical manner. We are also subjectively happier for the lack of guilt that would be associated with acting unethically. As a practical matter, progress can proceed quickly in societies that do not restrict the lines of enquiry on pre-conceived grounds (for example, Dark Ages Europe was a bit slower in this regard than say the US with its separation of Church and State).
Once death occurs you will not experience anything else, so any emotions of regret or fear are ultimately irrelevant. Whether one causes chaos and strife or feeds a billion people in one's life, it all amounts to the same thing, nothing.
Being able to see that your own interests are not the only ones worth considering does not require religious belief. This ability gives you ample reason to prefer feeding billions to causing chaos. It is easily grasped that people will continue to prefer to avoid suffering after your own death - and it certainly could matter to them what you did with your life after it is finished.
Is it any wonder no civilizations have sprung up and survived using this core belief?
The belief that science can help to explain things can be most helpful to a civilisation. Absence of a certain belief structure cannot really be described as a "core belief" that societies might spring from.
Atheism logically results in nihilism.
This bald assertion is a total non-sequitur. As an atheist who is not a nihilist, I dispute this strongly. The simple presence or absence of belief in deities or the supernatural does not say anything about whether or not you believe that ethical reasoning or social institutions are valid.
If you want to wallow in your animal emotions and think it means something despite your belief in the oblivion and finality of death, you are holding a much worse contradiction in your mind than the most fanatic of religious people.
Acknowledging that we are animals whose emotions and reasoning faculties are due to selection pressures in our evolutionary history does not render us any less able to live noble lives. Believing that there is no afterlife after bodily death does not make earthly life meaningless - if anything it assigns more value to the life we have now. Acting according to what you believe is right is certainly no less meaningful than acting out of fear of retribution after your death.
It is also not logical to argue that a certain viewpoint is not the case simply because the you consider the consequences of that viewpoint distasteful. Even if the above arguments about non-religious worldviews were true (and they most certainly are not!) this would not constitute evidence for or against their actual truth.
There are rational reasons to refrain from burning an innocent person, even if you won't feel bad about it later.
Most ethical systems that take universality into account would suggest that you should not hurt someone simply to advantage yourself. Most simply, this is an extension of the so-called "Golden Rule": Treat others as you would like to be treated.
The point is that if everyone threw acid into innocent people's faces for a few bucks we'd have a lot of people with acid in their face. If you change your persepective to that of the person in the chair, it is most likely that you would prefer to avoid intense pain and disfigurement more than the acid-thrower would like to get the money.
A handy little test that can give some guide as to whether an action is ethical is to see whether it would still seem good to you if the tables were turned.
If you were to argue that there is no rational reason to behave ethically, you can look at the consequences of this behaviour for everyone (yourself included): it's pretty easy to see that everyone would become worse off - so again, from universality, you are better off behaving ethically - because you would prefer that everyone did.
Remember that, considered from their own point of view, everyone is "me"/"I".
The end part of that quote you mention is very revealing:
JV: I don't want to get into the definition of morality. I never said anything was immoral in what I was saying. I said it is wrong to take something that belongs to somebody else.
He is saying he doesn't want to discuss morality - and then makes a rather broad moral judgment. Nice bit of doublethink, that.
What has always convinced me of creationism is simply this -- when I view a person, a tree, or a star lit sky and all the amazing incredible intricate parts of it all (which thanks to science I get to know all so much more about) I can't help but question a theory that somehow this all came about with a big bang and a whole lot of chance...it's all to perfect...somebody had to have had a hand in it all.
This sort of reasoning is sometimes described as the "argument from personal incredulity". I see no reason to doubt the sincerity or conviction of people who reject the scientific explanations of our origins for this or similar reasons. But the simple fact that you find something difficult to believe does not constitute a valid argument against that something.
I am going to go ahead and take the box - the way I see it, free will is an illusion.
Free will seems to be one of those things about which discussion tends to become a little confused - I think that this might be because the concept itself doesn't really make that much sense.
I don't see myself, or anyone else, exercising "free will" as such. What I do see, is people making decisions. Many factors affect those decisions, including such things as your past experiences, your mood, the information available to you about the options you perceive, the importance that you place on the respective outcomes, preferences that are innate in some way (due to say, your genetic makeup), etc, etc. These things are "external" or "internal" to varying degrees.
Unfortunately this doesn't leave much space for a "me" to be sitting in amongst all these factors somehow "freely" choosing from amongst the alternatives. But if there were an inner "me" that was able to avoid being subject to all these factors, how would we account for the fact that things like our experiences plainly do influence the choices we make? I don't see how explanations of this kind could avoid leading to problems like acausality, homunculi and the ensuing infinite regress.
Now the parent points out that the division between self and non-self isn't a true division. This is a very good point. Your body's physical material is constantly being recycled (various tissues at differing rates). We are always having new experiences in the world and forming new memories. I would argue that our self isn't even consistent over time - if someone were to tell you they could immediately restore you to the exact physical and mental state you were some time ago (say at ten years old) wouldn't this be something you would want to avoid? Wouldn't you feel like you had died in some way?
I think an ancestor of this post mentioned a "creator" who has imbued us with free will etc, and time is required so that choices can be made and that free will expressed - while I am sure that this point of view is useful for some, I prefer natural explanations for natural phenomena.
The point is that our brain (or mind) has the ability to allow us to make choices based on the situation. We are also able to make better choices as we gain the benefit of experience. That is clearly a pretty useful (ie adaptive) quality for our ancestors to have had, so we've got it too. Adding "free will" into the mix seems to me to be an unnecessary removal of causality (a pretty useful concept!) from our explanation for no benefit.
The last thing I want to add is that decision making is not limited to people. Animals and even machines (especially computers) can perform various actions that will be dependent on the situation at hand. And I don't think we can say "oh, but they're just automatons, we don't hold them responsible for what they choose": think about how you treat your dog if he fouls your rug... I see no reason to suppose that decisions made by humans (who presumably have free will) and non humans (who don't) are somehow qualitatively different.
I know this is nitpicking, but here in Australia we have preferential voting - you number the candidates in the order of your preference, and if your first choice doesn't get up, your vote is still counted.Once all but a couple of candidates are eliminated, the preferences from people who voted for other candidates flow on to the top contenders - so if you hate one major party slightly more than the other you can make sure to put them nearer the bottom.
An "X" next to your preferred candidate would be considered an informal vote, and wouldn't be counted at all.
By the by, if only there'd been preferential voting in the US presidential "election" of 2000, all those Nader votes could have flowed on to Gore. Sigh.
Yeah, except the environmentalist don't protest much other than here in the US. Whether it is ecology issues, racism, sexism or peace marches, most of the action is here in the USA where well-to-do clueless college kids are in abundance
Pardon?
Protests as a demonstration of public sentiment are near-universal. Protests for progressive issues would seem in recent times to be much larger and more frequent in most other industrialised democracies compared to the US.
OK, you may have been talking just about Russia, but the world does not divide up into Russia and the USA anymore!
But the importance of conscious (ie human) observation is at the heart of the Copenhagen interpretation; the problem with this view is what I think the parent comment was talking about. The infinite regress is better known as Wigner's Friend.
If a conscious entity makes a certain observation, and acts on the results of it, this has plenty of potential for having an effect on the universe. What if, upon seeing the dead cat, the scientist concerned was so overcome with guilt that he was finally sent mad and decided that now was the time to detonate the nuke he'd been secretly building on the side for years?
The whole point of the thought experiment is to take a probabilistic quantum event and magnify its consequences up to the macroscopic scale - where it can change how it is perceived by conscious entities.
It's not humans as such, but conscious entities that the Copenhagen interpretation talks about - but humans, being the only uncontroversially conscious entity readily available, are the ones normally considered.
The many difficulties with "wavefuction collapse" at the time of conscious observation is one of the main reasons that many people prefer the Everett (multiverse) interpretation.
Olber's paradox causes no problems when considered against conventional cosmology, or the cosmology discussed in the article - have a look here.
This explanation is not affected by an actually infinite number of stars, as postulated in the article. Even in a universe only as big as the part we can observe, there are a near-enough to infinite number of stars for the purposes of the paradox anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Doom and Castle Wolfenstein (along with Rise of the Triads and some versions of Marathon, among others) all preceded Quake, but they weren't true 3D in the sense of the environments and characters all being rendered on the fly. First Person Shooters before Quake used scaled sprites for the characters, weapon blasts etc, and the environments used scaled and mapped textures to various levels of sophistication. They were more 2.5D than 3D, although some of the ones that came out around the same time as Quake were starting to look pretty good (like Marathon Infinity or Duke Nukem 3D).
I do agree that there are many real situations where nobody will find out if you commit an immoral (although I prefer to call it an unethical) act, and so your reputation will remain unharmed. My response would be that in practice it is generally impossible to distinguish these situations from the ones where you will get found out. This means that you are better off not behaving unethically at all. I think that this is a goodly part of the reason why we have evolved the capacity for empathy, but I won't go too far into that just now - my posts are getting long enough as it is!
I see two aspects to a belief in God that would have an effect on one's behaviour in this thought experiment. One is that that if you do throw the acid, you might suffer punishment in the afterlife, the other is that throwing the acid is [presumably] not what God wants (ie it's against the divine plan/moral code). I think it is relatively straightforward to see that the first effect is simply a delayed form of punishment, and thus effectively changes the balance of consequences of throwing the acid to a point where it's against your own interests to do so, in spite of the money. The second effect is a little more complex, but I think that it boils down to causing you to have an implicit goal: for your actions to accord with what God wants.
This relates to your second question: "Is belief in god the only reason not to always pursue one's own self-interest at the expense of others?". My answer to this question is a resounding "no"! We have already talked about the social/reputation reasons, which I think that we would agree do apply in many situations. Also, the existence of empathy effectively entangles your own self-interest with the interests of others. But even if we ignore these practical considerations, there are still many ethical systems that do not depend on the existence of a God for their validity.
The difficulty with deriving behavioural codes from divinely revealed principles is that if the rules are contingent (ie it's logically possible that they could have been different), then they are (at least to some degree) arbitrary. If they're not contingent, that means that there are constraints on what God can do. The dilemma is neatly summed up in questions of the form: "could God have chosen to make [insert evil act here] good and [insert good act here] evil"?
Is there an a priori reason not to [act as if our own interests are always more important than those of others]?
I think that there is no a priori reason either way - if we start assuming things we'll always just be question begging. However, I don't see any good reason to presume one's own suffering or pleasure is more important or intense than that of others, and without any good reasons supporting this idea, it's not rational to base your behaviour on it. Of course sometimes your actions must be more directly concerned with your own pleasure/sufffering, simply because people only have direct access to their own preferences/feelings and have a better idea about how different outcomes might affect them. But aside from the portion of self-interest you must use to avoid getting screwed over, I see no reason for anyone to think that they are more important than everyone else on the planet.
Now this is a fairly utilitarian point of view, but in spite of the frequent pejorative use of that term, I am not uncomfortable with it. I simply see suffering in general as bad, whether it be mine or someone else's. This makes outcomes that reduce net suffering a desirable goal, and so it is better to act to avoid or reduce suffering, even if you might forego the odd wad of cash.
Dude, Quake isn't "another one of the 3D videogames" - it was the first true-3D first person shooter, and it surely rocked.
Just a tiny point though - your surroundings only change if you're not camping.
When writing dates down, we always use day/month/year. To me this makes a lot more sense than month/day/year, as at least the significance of each part is monotonically increasing. Year/month/day would be even better, as it would match regular numbers (like an odometer).
Another post mentioned that the use of "9/11" is confusing when you're used to the day/year convention - I would say that this was true initially, but "9/11" has now been used a lot here (possibly in deference to the way Americans chose to refer to it). These days it pretty much seems like a proper noun, and is routinely used in conversation and the media without a second thought, as is the otherwise slightly unusual "September [the] 11th".
The worm is also a suspect for causing big problems in the communications in the New South Wales (that's the Australian state Sydney's in) train network on Sunday.
I would say I at least attempted to address both of these ideas. That you are obviously unhappy with my attempt doesn't mean I missed the point, and I certainly wasn't trying to be patronising.
I think that the disagreement here hinges at least partly on the meaning of the word "rational". I was implictly referring to something approaching meaning 3 here. I would infer that you favour a definition of "rational" closer to the one implied by "rational economic man" - something along the lines of always doing whatever will maximise one's own personal gain.
In this "rational economic man" sense of rational, you would by definition do whatever was of most benefit to you. If you use this definition of rational, the original scenario is simply a question begging exercise: this thought experiment is (presumably intentionally) constructed where there is all carrot and no stick involved in throwing acid into someone else's face. So "rational economic man" certainly would throw the acid and take the money. But this does not mean that a real human being, acting rationally (in the sense of using logic and reason) would do so.
You seem to miss the point that even though as an intellectual exercise I can predict the effect of universalizing my own actions, there isn't in fact any mechanism by which my decisions are universalized.
This isn't a point that I've missed - it's something I would actively disagree with. There is a mechanism by which decisions are universalised, and it is the precise reason that the scenario we are discussing is a thought experiment rather than a common real-life situation. People do not exist in a social vacuum where they interact with strangers once and can choose to act in any way they like, free of consequences. The demands of your life often require that you interact with people you've met before, and in all likelihood will meet again. Because interactions are conducted with knowledge of previous behaviour, your reputation is important, and most people who are not psychopaths will cast adverse judgements on those who defect, and will treat them less favourably in the future.
In game theory this is why the iterated prisoner's dilemma is a much better guide to real-world behaviour than the simple prisoner's dilemma.
Being able to see that we would all be better off if we all behave in a way that could be applied universally is a rational reason to behave that way. This is not affected by the fact that in some instances (particularly such as this unrealistic example) universalisable behaviour might not be the best way to maximise our own personal benefit.
What I am getting at is that there is no a priori reason that we should always act as if our own personal interests are always more important than the interests of others. This is what I was talking about when I said "everyone is I/me". In practice of course we are frequently the best defenders of our own interests, but this does not mean that applying logic and reason to the situations we might find ourselves in will always result in disregarding the effect that our actions will have on others.
Wolves are a good example I hadn't thought of - but even with the alpha male/female pair, the subservient wolves are still related to the breeding pair aren't they?
You are right then that group-selection does sometimes occur - but I'm not convinced it could ever occur for the good of the species at large.
You are also right that empathy helps - although I think that this helps us realise we should be concerned with the needs of others, as I originally suggested. I disagree however that it is a species-preservation technique. The idea that traits which help a whole species survive can be favoured by natural selection is a difficult one to maintain - see here. There are also people without the capacity for empathy - psychopaths.
I also agree that many of our perceived morals are societal constraints or biological impulses - but this does not automatically mean that they are entirely without independent merit.
I would argue that the current Western Civilisation, considered at large, is a "successful civilisation" by most measures. While it is probably true that most people in our civilisation are religious, saying that most people within it are fanatics is a bit of a stretch.
Without something to believe in, what reason is there to behave, or to make progress, or to organize civilly?
Plenty. We are all better off, including within the period of our own lifetime, if we agree to act in a civil and ethical manner. We are also subjectively happier for the lack of guilt that would be associated with acting unethically. As a practical matter, progress can proceed quickly in societies that do not restrict the lines of enquiry on pre-conceived grounds (for example, Dark Ages Europe was a bit slower in this regard than say the US with its separation of Church and State).
Once death occurs you will not experience anything else, so any emotions of regret or fear are ultimately irrelevant. Whether one causes chaos and strife or feeds a billion people in one's life, it all amounts to the same thing, nothing.
Being able to see that your own interests are not the only ones worth considering does not require religious belief. This ability gives you ample reason to prefer feeding billions to causing chaos. It is easily grasped that people will continue to prefer to avoid suffering after your own death - and it certainly could matter to them what you did with your life after it is finished.
Is it any wonder no civilizations have sprung up and survived using this core belief?
The belief that science can help to explain things can be most helpful to a civilisation. Absence of a certain belief structure cannot really be described as a "core belief" that societies might spring from.
Atheism logically results in nihilism.
This bald assertion is a total non-sequitur. As an atheist who is not a nihilist, I dispute this strongly. The simple presence or absence of belief in deities or the supernatural does not say anything about whether or not you believe that ethical reasoning or social institutions are valid.
If you want to wallow in your animal emotions and think it means something despite your belief in the oblivion and finality of death, you are holding a much worse contradiction in your mind than the most fanatic of religious people.
Acknowledging that we are animals whose emotions and reasoning faculties are due to selection pressures in our evolutionary history does not render us any less able to live noble lives. Believing that there is no afterlife after bodily death does not make earthly life meaningless - if anything it assigns more value to the life we have now. Acting according to what you believe is right is certainly no less meaningful than acting out of fear of retribution after your death.
It is also not logical to argue that a certain viewpoint is not the case simply because the you consider the consequences of that viewpoint distasteful. Even if the above arguments about non-religious worldviews were true (and they most certainly are not!) this would not constitute evidence for or against their actual truth.
Most ethical systems that take universality into account would suggest that you should not hurt someone simply to advantage yourself. Most simply, this is an extension of the so-called "Golden Rule": Treat others as you would like to be treated.
The point is that if everyone threw acid into innocent people's faces for a few bucks we'd have a lot of people with acid in their face. If you change your persepective to that of the person in the chair, it is most likely that you would prefer to avoid intense pain and disfigurement more than the acid-thrower would like to get the money.
A handy little test that can give some guide as to whether an action is ethical is to see whether it would still seem good to you if the tables were turned.
If you were to argue that there is no rational reason to behave ethically, you can look at the consequences of this behaviour for everyone (yourself included): it's pretty easy to see that everyone would become worse off - so again, from universality, you are better off behaving ethically - because you would prefer that everyone did.
Remember that, considered from their own point of view, everyone is "me"/"I".
Concise, cogent and true. Nice!
JV: I don't want to get into the definition of morality. I never said anything was immoral in what I was saying. I said it is wrong to take something that belongs to somebody else.
He is saying he doesn't want to discuss morality - and then makes a rather broad moral judgment. Nice bit of doublethink, that.
This sort of reasoning is sometimes described as the "argument from personal incredulity". I see no reason to doubt the sincerity or conviction of people who reject the scientific explanations of our origins for this or similar reasons. But the simple fact that you find something difficult to believe does not constitute a valid argument against that something.
Free will seems to be one of those things about which discussion tends to become a little confused - I think that this might be because the concept itself doesn't really make that much sense.
I don't see myself, or anyone else, exercising "free will" as such. What I do see, is people making decisions. Many factors affect those decisions, including such things as your past experiences, your mood, the information available to you about the options you perceive, the importance that you place on the respective outcomes, preferences that are innate in some way (due to say, your genetic makeup), etc, etc. These things are "external" or "internal" to varying degrees.
Unfortunately this doesn't leave much space for a "me" to be sitting in amongst all these factors somehow "freely" choosing from amongst the alternatives. But if there were an inner "me" that was able to avoid being subject to all these factors, how would we account for the fact that things like our experiences plainly do influence the choices we make? I don't see how explanations of this kind could avoid leading to problems like acausality, homunculi and the ensuing infinite regress.
Now the parent points out that the division between self and non-self isn't a true division. This is a very good point. Your body's physical material is constantly being recycled (various tissues at differing rates). We are always having new experiences in the world and forming new memories. I would argue that our self isn't even consistent over time - if someone were to tell you they could immediately restore you to the exact physical and mental state you were some time ago (say at ten years old) wouldn't this be something you would want to avoid? Wouldn't you feel like you had died in some way?
I think an ancestor of this post mentioned a "creator" who has imbued us with free will etc, and time is required so that choices can be made and that free will expressed - while I am sure that this point of view is useful for some, I prefer natural explanations for natural phenomena.
The point is that our brain (or mind) has the ability to allow us to make choices based on the situation. We are also able to make better choices as we gain the benefit of experience. That is clearly a pretty useful (ie adaptive) quality for our ancestors to have had, so we've got it too. Adding "free will" into the mix seems to me to be an unnecessary removal of causality (a pretty useful concept!) from our explanation for no benefit.
The last thing I want to add is that decision making is not limited to people. Animals and even machines (especially computers) can perform various actions that will be dependent on the situation at hand. And I don't think we can say "oh, but they're just automatons, we don't hold them responsible for what they choose": think about how you treat your dog if he fouls your rug... I see no reason to suppose that decisions made by humans (who presumably have free will) and non humans (who don't) are somehow qualitatively different.
An "X" next to your preferred candidate would be considered an informal vote, and wouldn't be counted at all.
By the by, if only there'd been preferential voting in the US presidential "election" of 2000, all those Nader votes could have flowed on to Gore. Sigh.
Pardon?
Protests as a demonstration of public sentiment are near-universal. Protests for progressive issues would seem in recent times to be much larger and more frequent in most other industrialised democracies compared to the US.
OK, you may have been talking just about Russia, but the world does not divide up into Russia and the USA anymore!
If a conscious entity makes a certain observation, and acts on the results of it, this has plenty of potential for having an effect on the universe. What if, upon seeing the dead cat, the scientist concerned was so overcome with guilt that he was finally sent mad and decided that now was the time to detonate the nuke he'd been secretly building on the side for years?
The whole point of the thought experiment is to take a probabilistic quantum event and magnify its consequences up to the macroscopic scale - where it can change how it is perceived by conscious entities.
It's not humans as such, but conscious entities that the Copenhagen interpretation talks about - but humans, being the only uncontroversially conscious entity readily available, are the ones normally considered.
The many difficulties with "wavefuction collapse" at the time of conscious observation is one of the main reasons that many people prefer the Everett (multiverse) interpretation.
Olber's paradox causes no problems when considered against conventional cosmology, or the cosmology discussed in the article - have a look here.
This explanation is not affected by an actually infinite number of stars, as postulated in the article. Even in a universe only as big as the part we can observe, there are a near-enough to infinite number of stars for the purposes of the paradox anyway.