(Deleted)

(Deleted)

Edited by Marc_Geddes, 28 July 2005 - 06:51 AM.

Will you persevere?


Dear Marc Geddes:

The science of morality, you are asking.

I have not read totally your initiating post.

But since you say science of morality, I guess you want to know first whether there can be a science of morality.

Do you mean whether morality the phenomenon can be studied scientifically?

I have a similar topic asking whether philosophy and philosophers can be studied scientifically, in that thread on the extinction of philosophy, which title is also a bit misleading.

Yes, philosophy can be studied scientifically, so also morality.

But I am always overwhelmed by the least contemplation of the labor in store for me to study philosophy scientifically, first of all because I am not a scientist.

Then I would delimit the scope until it is so much specified as to for me just examine scientifically the dense philosophy posts in ImmInst forum, for what meanings their authors intend by their dense vocabulary. Even this work has been neglected to date.

So, tell me whether you will persevere in this study.

susma

The post is too long.

This is a very informative post of Marc Geddes, "Towards a Science of Morality". I have not seen his other posts or threads in this forum of ImmINst, except the one where he brought up de Sade and his denial of God's existence.

But he left because Stranger got ballistic against him for denying the existence of God, for Stranger has talks with not only God but gods and goddesses and all kinds of spirit guides.

But I continued with Stranger and we went into the existence of the gods and goddesses of Stranger. Briefly, Stranger experiences gods and goddesses, talks with them. So they exist in his experience, if nothing else.

For my part I am interested in the mundane, drab, dismal world of daily life, like looking for a small screw dropped on the floor. Which such mundane concerns it seems to me Stranger could not satisfy me as regards the relevancy of his gods and goddesses.

So, my conclusion which I have not yet placed in that thread of Geddes about de Sade and his denial of God's existence, is that the gods of Stranger are matters that belong to the recreational world, like a lot of religions and philosophies.

The recreational world is everything where at the end of te day it cannot in principle be relevant to the search for a small screw dropped on the floor, but it is a good pastime and good for the exercise of brain cells if nothing else.

The recreational world embraces the world of recreational drugs, and that is where I got the insight, that a lot of human knowledge and thinking belongs to the recreational world.

The recreational world is distinct from the more important and absolutely crucial critical world of what I call the creational life.

The creational life or world is everything that can be in principle connected to such mundane, drab, dismal concerns as looking for a small screw dropped on the floor.

The creational world is mundane, drab, dismal, while the recreational world is arcane, garb, ideal, but it can be procrastinated indefinitely without any harm to our actual physiological life and its operations, I mean the recreational life, but not so with the creational life.

As a matter of fact, the creational life is absolutely necessary for the recreational life to exist and function.


Coming back to the science of morality, I think it is too long, but if Marc would just pick one very specific point then it could be more appealing to visitors; because I imagine most visitors are occupied with one particular question of morality, like whether for a lot of young men today in the US, whether they can morally dodge the draft when it comes -- what with all the wars Bush is going to launch in order to bring the rest of mankind to liberty and democracy.

Or whether Bush attack and invasion and occupation of Iraq is morally justified.

So, Marc Geddes, if you come to visit your thread, please next time introduce a very specific topic when you start a thread.

See next post for an example of a very specific topic for a thread on morality.

Susma

Susma

The morality of live-in relationship,
as an example of a concise topic for a thread


The above is an example of a very specified topic on morality. And one can do a scientific examination of the morality of live-in relationship.

As far as I can recall on how to make a scientific study, first we define the terms used in the title of the topic to be examined. Then we delimit the extent of the topic. Next we state the subject materials to be included in the study. Further on we describe the particular method to be used which is of course scientific. Finally we get going on broadly three directions, in order of time: collecting the facts or data, examining the data, drawing the conclusions and adding also the implications which last is the most important, namely, the implications.

Very briefly then, by live-in relationship we refer to a man and a woman staying together and enjoying sex aside from the other incidentals of the conventional married life and home, but without the stable obligations and rights of marriage, so that the relationship can be terminated by either party, even as drastically as one party just not reporting back to the other, and simply disappears.

By morality we mean whether in the last analysis the person doing the act feels in his mind that he is comfortable with himself, more concretely he does not feel unworthy in his own image of himself as a person of self-respect, and still more concretely he does not feel as he would feel bad, if everyone is doing something to earn a living, he is doing nothing but is dependent on others for a living.

Making a long story short, live-in relationship is no longer immoral for a lot of people in the Western urbanized setting because with the availability of effective and safe contraceptives women don't have to get pregnant if they don't want to, and both men and women can be safe from diseases even with sex freedom.


So, Marc Geddes, I suggest that you bring up a specific behavior in regard to morality and examine it for an answer whether it is moral or immoral, and in the process bringing in all the nitty-gritty of morality studies in all their minutiae.

Susma

Long on analysis and lost on synthesis,
Where does Buddha come in here?

Last two paragraphs of Marc Geddes' OP, "Towards a Science of Morality":

If there is one central idea that should be put forward it is this: the universe is a coherent unified system and to some degree that coherence is reflected in the minds of all sentient beings (including humans). There is a Universal Morality defining an 'arrow of morality' which points in the direction of ever greater growth and increasing knowledge ('Extrapolated Volition', 'The Omega Point'). One could say that the universe is attempting to 'know itself' - sentient's are finite beings who are ever driven to broaden their horizons to 'close the gap' between themselves and the universe (which is infinite). They appear to be the means through which the cosmos tries to comprehend itself.

The Buddhists, it seems, were right. All evil comes from ignorance. And the meaning of life in three words? Know thy self.

I must congratulate Marc for his exposition of a lot of issues pertinent to the question of morality, and his general conclusion is also impressive.

But I have the feeling of emptiness with all such kinds of studies, which I am inclined to suspect is also what a lot of philosophers are into, namely, their authors seem to be sitting on an armchair supported in the distant height of the sky on a cloud, and they talk on and on in a most abstract fashion. If nothing else, for being lengthy the study meets the criterions of what I consider to be dense writing.

The thing that attracts my interest in Marc's disquisition is his bringing to mind the distinction between legality and morality, "Further, there is a clear difference between legality and morality".

For me, a man in the street, that is a very important and useful to me distinction. And my own conclusion from this distinction is that in everyday practical life, people take care to not get in trouble with the law or even to evade the law, but they take as much immorality as they can weather the frowns in other people's noses.

And rulers of men have long come to the conclusion to enforce with physical pain what they deem to be necessary for men in live together in peace and within a viable order of things.

But where does Buddha come in with a scientific study of morality?

Honestly, did you, Marc, decide to end with some allusion to Buddhism even though it does not fit well with any attempt "Towards a Science of Morality"?

The Buddhists, it seems, were right. All evil comes from ignorance. And the meaning of life in three words? Know thy self.

It seems to me that you had been spending hours and consuming ingredients trying to cook up some menu, and towards the end gave up, and dumped the whole mess into the garbage bin, with some kind of exclamation like Sh__!, in that parting shot where Buddhism comes in.

As a matter of fact, Buddhism is engaged in all kinds of "know nothing" thinking. Try this experiment, ask ten Buddhist spokesmen what is Nirvana, and see if you get anywhere that can qualify as a logical answer, much less a scientific answer.

What do I say? We seem to have been on a recreational trip, and Buddhism is to my observation also essentially a recreational trip.

Try to remember what you learned in methodology of scientific research and bring up some specific moral question to deal with really scientifically.

I thought I was going to read science in regard to morality, but I am disappointed.

Susma

Hi Marc,

I greatly enjoyed the intial post. As someone who is neck deep in complex systems research (network neuroscience) I can say I have often felt similarly as you on a number of issues. There must be general rules of operation for systems at any level of organization, and human cultures are no exception. Of course the values will shift according to local context and the availability of information available to a system, but this doesn't make a universal morality any less relevant as you have pointed out. My deep intuition from looking at many complex systems at many scales is that the "arrow of morality" of which you speak is identical to the "arrow of increasing specified complexity" which is evident in all complex systems.

On your comments about Pinker's "Blank Slate", namely that there is not one, this is true. There is a great deal of cultural information which is pre-encoded by normal human brain develoment. In fact it has been shown by a few studies recently that even primates have a well developed sense of fairplay. There is also a tremendous amount of plasticity in the brain though, which may allow for social flexibility, but there is definitely some information which has been encoded by evolution for forming working social groups. (One of the scientific questions I am trying to address directly is how much information is pre-encoded by developmnet of mammalian brains)

I would enjoy further discussion on this topic and have considered writing a book on such a topic. A further reference I would suggest is "Nonzero" by Robert Wright

As a final note, I found amusement and sadness in the irony found in the comparison of the last line of your post and the following four posts.

Best
Peter

I gave up after the third paragraph. Okay, maybe there is something of value down in there and I will find it worth my time to go read more. Good that it is valuable to some. Maybe I've already thrashed this subject out enough for myself. Granted a good expostion of this stuff might be the key to releasing some from penned up options.

Do I see a rather simple justification for finding a science of morality? Yes, I think so, without reading into the whole post that probably does address it. Maybe I'm just that average consumer looking for the short sound bytes, slogans or sayings, I can use to not think.[huh]

Evolution is a logical consequence of chance associations. Up until the advent of mind stuff and physiological apparati for tool development, seems the major successful criterium of a species was whether or not it could find a niche sustaining the greatest diversity. Organisms that tend to destroy themselves and others don't tend to stick around. The reason and what can be used to find the greatest moral path at any one moment is to seek to sustain options. Seeing that an information system is characterized with maximum sustainable information carrying capacity when using isomorphic symbol probability generation leads to concrete scientific justification of egalitarianism as simply a reasonable idea.

Humans have a great tendency to bias when considering general human innate but also social characteristics. Perhaps we often think of ourselves as something other than natural organisms via various abstract classifications and terminology sets possibly largely derived from the inherent weakness of depending on second-order cybernetic systems as information authorities, a natural failing of humanity's on-going anarchy. In that respect I find that the consideration of morals might be more subject to this obfuscation and complexification by "the powers that be" more so than other realms of thought. The question of scientific morality then tends to congeal into a rather amorphous exhibition and exploration as to whether or not there is an outside to our box that we might care to think about.

I had to go back and at least read the last line. I find myself thinking of the laughing Buddha [lol]

Chip

Hi Marc,

For the laymen I would suggest Kauffman's "At Home in the Universe" and Steven Johnson's "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, and Cities". If you have any mathematical background at all though, the best introductory book I have found is:"Thinking in Complexity: the Computational Dynamics of Matter, Mind, and Mankind" by Klaus Mainzer. Also for a very philosophical perspective on things I would strongly suggest Teilhard de Chardin's "The Phenomenon of Man", especially as regards 'the arrow of increasing specified complexity'

As to what I meant by that phrase - over the entire history of the universe there has been an increasing tendency towards more connectivity between all systems on all scales. System rules always seem to favor this increasing connectivity, but are balanced by forces which may cause systems which are 'over-connected' (i.e insular) to collapse. There is a constant struggle between connectionism which causes systems to become more integrated, and evolutionary adaptability which allows rapid change in the face of shifting environments. Systems which are highly integrated (have a large degree of self-awarness) but are open to change and even greater integration, seem to be the most successful systems in terms of growth and longevity.

Peter

Apologies, but make it BEQ.

The post is too long.

This is a very informative post of Marc Geddes, "Towards a Science of Morality". I have not seen his other posts or threads in this forum of ImmINst, except the one where he brought up de Sade and his denial of God's existence.

But he left because Stranger got ballistic against him for denying the existence of God, for Stranger has talks with not only God but gods and goddesses and all kinds of spirit guides.

But I continued with Stranger and we went into the existence of the gods and goddesses of Stranger. Briefly, Stranger experiences gods... (snip snip snip)

Dear Marc Geddes and others here into science of morality.

I like to sincerely apologize for my somewhat irreverent posts, and specially mistaking Marc Geddes for Karonensis, that one of the author of the thread on de Sade and God's non-existence.

Don't let me disturb you all with your exchange on your science of morality. Allow me this remembrance which just came to my memory, there is a guy by the name of Chris Butler but he sports a Hindu name of some kind of Jagad Guru, or some other thing. He has a ministry called the Science of Identity Institute where they meditate on his lectures, a lot, and put on Hindu religious or ethnic costumes, burning incense, to discover their true identity. But they are into a lot of moralistic ideas like abortion, divorce, homosexuality, war, etc., which values they propound happen to be traditional and conventional

Anyway, as I have said in another thread, please take solace in the thought from that teacher two thousand years back in the land where the Jews and the Arabs might finally find peace between themselves after so much bloodletting, namely, that it is a waste to throw pearls before our fellow mammanlian brothers, which also Jews and Arabs religiously in effect malign by labelling them unclean and not worthy of food grade.

Congratulations to Marc for a very informative and instructive initiating post which candidates to philosophical thinking and writing can get themselves a good drill with.

I just have this idea of a policy for my intellectual life, that as with other things in today's world, things have got to be BEQ, to wit:

B or brief, if a topic is important to the man in the street of which the number is infinite, and it has got to be

E or easy, and it must be

Q or quick.

Otherwise, men in the street of which the number is infinite will not have any interest, because at heart they know they are the ones dictating life, and not any kind of theoreticians, when it comes to morality.

Still and withal, my apologies to Marc and his colleagues in dense philosophizing.

Susma