Morals and Absolute Truth

This topic is split from another thread..

Not exactly kevin, I'm talking about the whole "truth". (I need to write an essay on the definition, damn thing causes me more problems than I ever imagined.) But moral values are self defeating. They are subjective evolutions of survival instinct built upon community blah blah.

But here's the key,

All thought & action is theoritically based upon the previously mentioned truth. Thus all of today's moral actions thru moral laws are reckless indangerment of life due to the possible flaws within the moral system due to lacking the whole knowledge of this "truth". Said possible indangerment defeats the purpose of morals. The only possible way to continue conforming to morality is to set it aside completely to seek the "truth". Once this "truth" is discovered a new moral system will be built... assuming the "truth" doesn't completely destroy any chance of moral activity.

If you can bring that down with more than, "I like puppies!" I'll listen.

jaguar,

I'm not sure if I understand what you're saying exactly but it seems you are saying

Thought and action arise from absolute truth. Morals prevent the apprehension of absolute truth as they "get in the way" of searching by endangering life thus the search for truth is best performed without the influence of moral codes of conduct.

Am I correct in this paraphrase?

Nope. Current moral values are self defeating because without "absolute truth" the established values could be false. Even the possibility of these values being false makes them hypocritical and thus not in accordance with moral values. So the only form of morality possible is searching for "absolute truth" to establish true morality.

As far as morals taken into play while searching for "absolute truth"? Whatever gets the job done. I prefer complete dedication without actions that stray from achieving the goal. I assume it's understandable thru simply studying life as we always have, so though it may be lengthy, it's simple enough. Course, maybe not.

Edited by jaguar, 03 May 2005 - 11:30 PM.

If moral values arise from thought and action which arise from absolute truth are not moral values, at least in part, an expression of absolute truth and in examining them we might discern that aspect of the absolute truth from which they emanate?

How can morals be self-defeating when they are successful evolutionary expressions, or are you saying that they are soon to be supplanted by superior moral expressions?

The first one, yes.

The second, without absolute truth they will continue to remain subjective guessing. Moral values are rarely presented as subjective however. Rather objective. Their practitioners (rarely logicians) thus force their values on others rather than agreeing upon a corroborated set of values. IE... every war in human history.

Basiclly,
Without absolute truth the future could always bring more information proving past "established" laws to be false. Thus the hypocrisy in acting as if anything is true unless the theoritic truths are made to pursue the absolute truth. And these theoritic truth to ALWAYS be presented as theoritical until absolute truth is PROVEN. Proving it however is a part I've yet to figure out.

Rather than saying, "This is right, this is wrong." What should be said is, "We don't know. Let's move on."

I'd like to state the importance I view within this theory. I believe it to be the next stepping stone for humanity. Can anyone debate this?

Our current state of affairs is in really bad shape since only a relative few have both the inclination and resources to accurately evaluate reality and manipulate some of its elements with judgment-action consistency, while another relative few have the resources but don’t care (perhaps unwittingly) about much else except indulging and reinforcing their evolutionary biases. This is a representation of even the best current governments. Jaguar, you’re likely to be right that humankind is operating on too small of a knowledge base.

However, I think that it’s important to consider that energy would generally be more wisely spent on using contemporary institutions to effectively transcend them, not change them. Let the politicians and common folk preoccupy themselves with negligible shifts on production possibilities curves. The institutions will change importantly only when everybody has a birthright to superintelligence and invincibility. It’s only that now, humans are too slow and clumsy to optimize matter and energy, so we’re all really just scraping out an existence, and it appears as though there are huge disparities in wealth and knowledge.

One should have a little bit more compassion. It’s impossible for most humans to perpetuate, please others, and still know who they are and what the hell they’re doing.

Transcedence is my exact point. Though a bit swift and rough, this theory of mine seems to take that step quite well. Compassion on the other hand seems pointless while our enemies are not absolutely determined. This all boils down to a basic law of game theory, know your environment or fail.

Your opinion?

Well, perhaps compassion would be pointless, but that would depend on its form. If impartially evaluating the human condition for what it is, rather than as factional and invoking enemies, maneuvering might be much easier (because you’d have a better attitude and it would show), unless you can pull off disassociation in all your deals without ever blowing it.

I look for absolute truth without the filter of 'human' foibles by searching where the human consciousness has little sway. The animal kingdom and physics are pretty good examples of what I would consider unadulterated reflections of at least portions of the absolute truth. (which I believe is simply an impertative to exist btw)

Compassion and empathy are not 'morals'. They are instinctive and built into our genomes. Morals are outgrowths of the biological rules which govern human interaction. We see less developed versions within the animal kingdom and as intelligence increases and interactions between entities more complex, we see higher and more instantiated forms of their expression.

It is likely that these are more complicated versions of cooperation which has been shown to have a biological basis from slime-molds sacrificing themselves to form the mortal stalk of a fruiting body while their bretheren go on to be the next generation, to the complex interactions of societies and cultures which when threatened are willing to die for the good of the many. A search of the available literature shows that the evolutionary reasoning for cooperation is emerging.

http://www.emory.edu...2/altruism.html

Everything is about existing and continuity.

Morals, although misguided and subject to the changing whiims of social evolution are part of the fabric of reality as much as anything physical, parts of the absolute truth. In denigrating them to artifice and impediments you overlook this.

Picture yourself as one fractal pattern amongst many similar but slightly different fractals in multi-dimensional space where perpetuation of your pattern is dependent on the changing definition of your dynamic boundaries realtive to others. The group of fractals also forms a repeating pattern as a collective which as a higher order structure can be taken as an entity itself. This is analagous to the information stored in individuals DNA who make up the human species.

There MUST be some physical basis for the interaction between elements of a pattern (whether an individual or species or multiple species) which leads to its perpetuation of that pattern in a dynamic environment. If there is an absolute truth I would think evolution and natural selection operating on the basis of the laws of physics comes close, and cooperation/empathy/compassion is part of that system.

Truth about physical reality and so-called moral truths are totally different things, as materialists who philosophize about morality often note. There is only one true physical reality, which our mental models approximate. Statements about morality are incredibly high-level descriptions of commonalities in human attitudes which arise (as Kevin mentioned) as outgrowths of our underlying neurological foundations, and how those foundations undergo reliable transformations through exposure to a recurring set of everyday human experiences.

In morality, the problem arises when philosophers begin to refer to moral propositions as nonphysical Platonic objects, i.e., they grant an ontological rather than epistemological status to moral statements. But we know the world is not built of moralities - it is built out of atoms, which sometimes fall into configurations that hold moralities. Our brains are set up to execute the same cognitive operations in analyzing morality as those which are executed in the analysis of purely physical scenarios, i.e., whether a given fruit in one's hand is an apple or orange. This is perhaps not an ideal configuration, though quite expedient from the viewpoint of evolution.

Naked truth, that is, probabilistic empirical feedback from reality, is devoid of emotional and moral content. "Real" truth does not tantalize, intrigue, offend, inspire, or anything else of the sort, until it is ran through an interpreter (in our case, brains). There is a practically infinite sequence of possible interpretations for any given set of data, along with a practically infinite series of possible reactions, though by virtue of our humanity, we collectively occupy only a tiny portion of this spectrum.

To respond to Jaguar, I would say that rather than discarding the concepts of rightness and wrongness because of their unpleasant absolutist foundations, we should endeavor to hold probabilistic moral theories which include tenative indicators of rightness and wrongness that develop as data comes in. Instead of saying simply "we don't know", which puts us in the awkward position of saying that anything can be defined as right and anything can be defined as wrong, we should simply acknowledge that morals change over time and that nothing should be regarded as absolute, though some things seem very nearly so. There are many moral statements (billions or more) that nearly everyone in this forum, or even nearly everyone on this planet, would agree to wholeheartedly, it's just that these statements are very rarely discussed because our agreement on them is held for granted.

Moral absolutism exists as a psychological mechanism to discourage people from searching for loopholes in a moral rule for their own benefit. Maybe if we could actually choose to embody our moral ideals, the ad hockery of absolutist commandments could be abolished and we could collectively share in a superior morality defined by shades of grey rather than black and white. It is very important to state, as Nate Barna has, that this transformation will never occur within the context of our present human institutions and tools. Help from the outside is needed. To think that there are so many who see human beings as the only possible agents of change is a quite odd circumstance for the transhumanist to ponder - in light of the huge changes humans have craved for centuries, and the basic failure of human institutions to have anything but a meager impact on these desired changes - how can we hope to get anything of significance accomplished with our disappointingly limited present-day embodiments?

Verdantburst, exactly. You extrapolated what a much smarter version of me would have said.

verdantburst..

superb.. thanks..

Hum. My main theory requires morals to only exist within a system that pursues absolute truth completely. There are many reasons for this. Justice that may do wrong is not justice, truth that may be false is not truth. Reasons which so many live for may be complete illusions.

With that said, you've all seemed to miss my point. I will reread your replies and attempt to convey my message in a more understandable manner for all. In the meantime, please reread mine as well. For more information in the subject, check the "Truth" thread in philosophy. And "So Frustrated" in free speach.

jaguar| With that said, you've all seemed to miss my point.

No. You seemed to have missed our points, which were:

[*] we understand your point, which is that strict empiricism renders ethics unnecessary;
[*] you had the wrong idea about what strict empiricism means;
[*] how a correct interpretation of strict empiricism would be applied in practice.

Verdantburst- Considering that there have been so many contradictory moralities among humans throughout history and simultaneously, it cannot be maintained that there are many (if any) absolutes, or that such absolutes arise from a predictable interpreter (the brain) and recurring experiences.

Moralities are customs, which evolve independently of the human mind's basic equipment for surviving in the world (cf. the cultural adjuncts arising in primates and cetaceans). Moralities can often seem, and be, meaningless or destructive.

There are no absolute foundations for a morality, but one could say that a particular morality could be more or less useful in advancing a particular person's inherent motivations.

If there is any sort of cultural progress, I think it is in self-understanding, as a basis for judging moralities/ethics, and a willingness to discard historically accreted moralities/ethics which are not as useful, and adopting or creating other moralities/ethics.

It is difficult, however, since one use of moralities/ethics is to safeguard social membership, which is very hard to discard or substitute for, even if maintaining a morality is at the cost of all of one's other happiness. Which is why most people go with the flow (at least, on most things - inconsistency is predictable) - whether by being polite to your boss or sacrificing virgins to a volcano.

1Arcturus

Ah. Hello arcturus =] Good to see you again.


Nate,

I have to disagree, my main point was that human society has a glitch in it. Not that ethics are unnecessary but pointless outside of the pursuit. As well as laws, choice, all that is human life in general. What will be the reason to have these things after all? So you can infinitely play? So humanity can survive together, peacefully indulging themselves til the end of time? Perhaps to quell survival instinct? Or being carried by the current of life?

What I'm trying to say is, I see no logic in doing anything beyond pursuing absolute truth. Until it's uncovered, all conscious actions will be stabbing in the dark. Humanity has no reason for reason, there is no point in law, action, so on... Though perhaps within indulgence there's a use. It will all be a form of chaos within the order of absolute truth. We won't truly be alive, just puppets of the system, to be thrown by the waves. Of course many have argued that this isn't such a bad thing. But I think it is.

Do you understand?


And about these:

"you had the wrong idea about what strict empiricism means;

how a correct interpretation of strict empiricism would be applied in practice. "

I knew those points before this conversation began, I didn't perceive them important enough to my point to mention.

Edited by jaguar, 05 May 2005 - 12:40 AM.

jaguar| Not that ethic are unnecessary but pointless outside of the pursuit.

Well, "pointless outside of the pursuit" means "unnecessary."

jaguar| What I'm trying to say is, I see no logic in doing anything beyond pursuing absolute truth. Until it's uncovered, all conscious actions will be stabbing in the dark. Humanity has no reason for reason, there is no point in law, action, so on... Though perhaps within indulgence there's a use. It will all be a form of chaos within the order of absolute truth. We won't truly be alive, just puppets of the system, to be thrown by the waves. Of course many have argued that this isn't such a bad thing. But I think it is.

1. See a review of Freedom Evolves.
2. See the book Freedom Evolves.
3. Formulate a greater ambition than "pursuing absolute truth." You are Absolute Truth's co-creator.

jaguar| Do you understand?

Mm-hmm.

Greater ambition?! What could possibily be a greater ambition without absolute truth being known?! But aye, I'll check the book.

By that I meant intend to be a participant along with being an observer and not just merely be an observer.

Oh hush. My forming & spreading these topics alone shows me to be a participant.

Dear Jaguar,

Obviously that is not what I meant.

Jaguar, err first sorry for not answering on the messenger, you seem to send me messages when I'm in school heh.

Now, you know Jaguar, when I think of it, after we know EVERYTHING, as the complete theory, as I suppose will have to do a lot with math (hmm maybe a rational circle with order of including all possible mathematics as briefly as possible so to come whole over again- infinite and etc...)
--
What shall we do?!
I mean, nothing more to aspire to but keep knowing things.
Will we aspire to go back and forget stuff? May some will want forget everything and tart whole over again? - - aspire to oblivion?

Or is it when we'd be able to change the physics and create new unexplainable universes with different logics and play a game of letting other to figure?
A new game...

Who knows how long it will take to find it.
Maybe more than million years... Will you hold on being emotionless for so long? You'll get to a point were you must enjoy. To get hope.

Is it even possible to change everything? Go in the time to minus? Try exact opposite? I think that's matching perfectly this cosmos.

Is there a word to EVERYTHING?
When I say it, do you know what I mean?

I think our goal shall remain that goal. Some why I have some fear it will make us- too perfect. Up to point of no return. Is it possible? For knowing what shall happen we must get to that point in time and see for ourselves.
I desire to get there. I am so curios. And I cannot die.

But what's next?

EVERYTHING shall be known.

As that means- no over. If you claim to be over all that- then it means you never looked for knowing what I do- all possible, existable, nonexistable things and way beyond.

Thinking if there is something like thinking too much. If there is- I sure am. Is it?

Yours truthfully
~Infernity

Arcturus,

Note that I never said there were any/many moral absolutes. I said "There are many moral statements (billions or more) that nearly everyone in this forum, or even nearly everyone on this planet, would agree to wholeheartedly, it's just that these statements are very rarely discussed because our agreement on them is held for granted." In fact, the main point of my post was that out of the following choices:

1. Moral absolutism. (One perfect moral code, a la the Ten Commandments.)
2. Moral pragmatism. (I perform actions based on my interim approximation of who I want to be.)
3. Moral defeatism. (I can do whatever I want, society is full of shit and I don't care about what others think.)

...choice 2 is favorable. There is a moral continuum with 1 at one end and 3 at the other end. 2 is in the middle. 1 worked pretty well throughout history because it left no room for loopholes. Now that we are growing up, many of us have avidly discarded 1, but it is a mistake to choose 3 just because 1 didn't work out. 2 is the proper answer.

Moral statements most everyone would agree with include:

1. You being stabbed is bad.
2. You having sex is good.
3. You being well-fed is good.
4. You having fun is good.
5. You being cold is bad.
6. ...etc (an indefinitely large number.)

Notice how the variable "you" is often included. Nature builds organisms that are organism-centric. It had to, because for organisms to replicate themselves effectively in the anti-life environment of early Earth, selfishness was mandatory, not optional. Only in evolutionarily recent times did a selection dynamic favoring non-me-centric behaviors begin to emerge. (This is not because the way that evolution creates complexity changed, but because the mathematical operations underlying evolution favor inclusive genetic fitness, i.e., not just the organism itself, but also the genetic complexity it shares with kin.)

Rather than argue for moral absolutes, I would like to argue for shared information content between human moralities. Instead of viewing "morality" as what comes out of someone's mouth when you ask them "what is your morality?", I prefer to think of it as a complete readout of every response a given agent would have to every given stimulus. Obviously obtaining this readout is not plausible in practice, but viewing morality in this way gives it a definition that is well-defined and is useful for many of our purposes. Think of a morality as a complex algorithm that translates stimuli sets into response sets.

Viewed in this way, human moralities have a tremendous amount of shared information content, or mutual information, between them. Since evolutionary theory views a species as a set of organisms that traverse fitness space as a cohesive group, and since (as the Human Genome Project has empirically verified) we each have a huge amount of shared genetic information with one another, it makes sense that our stimulus-response tables would possess mutual information.

"Customs", the stimulus-response newcomers, all grow out of the massive underlying bedrock of the stimulus-response set characteristic to our species. We focus on them a lot because they are new and exciting to our human brains (if they weren't, then they wouldn't have replicated themselves all over the meme pool). Many customs encourage responses to stimuli which are favored by one groups' "moral code" and disfavored by another's. This is unfortunate, and will eventually need to be fixed. Given certain values (good/bad judgements) and certain moralities (stimulus-response tables), indefinitely large groups of agents might interact until the Heat Death of the universe and continue to produce positive feelings in each other. We might call such a hypothetical configuration a Moral Paradise.

The controversial view I would argue in favor of is that human society has slowly been moving towards such a Paradise throughout history, because as long as there is some reason we have to interact with each other (global trade is a big one), the way in which any given person optimizes their immediate environment will take into account the values (good/bad judgements) of others, either implicitly or explicitly. Even if the wishes of others is only a very small quantity in your decisionmaking process, over a indefinitely long time, decisions in the interest of person A tend to slightly improve the lives of persons B and C, although it might make the lives of D and E worse, the total magnitude of improvement for persons A, B, and C tends to outweigh the disimprovement of persons D and E. This is how the complex structure we call "society" got started, and how rules of thumb for turning zero sum games into positive sum games have become such a deeply rooted part of our daily experience.

When you are driving a car down a certain road, your decision inadvertantly takes into account that a group of persons decided to have that road built there. When you are applying for a job, the structure of your job application will reflect some variant of a common standard proven to gather the appropriate data for prospective employees. To change the system, we must often work within the system (the laws of physics being the final layer of any system). Even those who argue vaguely that they follow no morality at all do indeed exhibit behaviors highly constrained by the values and moralities of other human beings.

If I could sum up the philosophical implications of all of the above into one phrase, it would be: "Although our moralities often contradict, and people have pushed their selfish moralities as objective truths for millenia, this doesn't mean that we should abandon the project of morality altogether. I mean, we might find new methods that result in everyone having better lives, and if a set of humans wants to follow those rules and call them a good thing, then they should be encouraged. Also, knowing which kinds of methods improve the lives of people allows us to make consistent statements about which stimulus-response sets we like, rather than judging them on a case-by-case basis (which introduces the possibility of bias). It also helps us create theories about what types of choices we would want to make if our ability to optimize our environments ("power") increased. Such theories would have useful applications in domains such as nanotech and AI."

Nate,

Indeed.

Infern,

I think it would be a waste of time to guess what would be done after the goal is accomplished. The situation is most likely inconceivable at this point. And please, no more emotion debate.

Well Jaguar, that's weired since the question of "What after?" is the next question. The absurd is, that the answer to THE question suppose to contain the answer to that too...

Ah, my mind is so messed-up...

However, as the ultimate answer is what I aspire to know, I think in contra to you, I aspire to know beyond that too.

As some people say this is not relevant what's before the universe since it has supposedly never existed because the universe is EVERYTHING- I claim, but I wanna know.

Alright no emotions.

And aye, we shouldn't concern about what's after solving everything, everything means forever too, as this is kind of an endless circle, which I doubt we can break, so I will aspire for ever, and so desire forever.

The question beyond is a part of it.

I don't think you saw it.

Yours truthfully
~Infernity

Verdantburst,

When it comes to morality, perhaps, the exceptions are important for the rule, esp. when the rule is supposed to relate to a kind of natural, evolved sociality.

From among the items on your list, I know of at least one person on this forum who doesn't want to have fun, and I know one educated member of this site who doesn't want to have sex. Goodness, I hope no one here wants to be stabbed, but human diversity doesn't start with pre-conceived limits; it starts with what is possible and what is.

Instead of three choices, I think of thousands, perhaps millions, of historically-evolved moralities, which I think of as kind of cultural programs for behaviors. (The word morality comes from a Latin word for custom, etymologically they are the same thing.)

As scripts and so on, they are not actually behaviors (replicators), and they are not the same thing as the complex many-faceted nervous-system operations which hash out which behavior an individual person will perform in any particular situation (the process so complex that people call it 'free will'). There is no single response every human being would have to any experience, except the most trivial, genetically 'hard-wired' ones (and sometimes even these must be environmentally fostered).

I kind of doubt that any sort of purely altruistic motive has arisen in human beings by natural evolution, although perhaps it is possible, and I could be convinced by evidence. But I am optimistic because I don't believe it is so important, or perhaps even, in every situation, a good idea.

I think if society, human beings, life, safety, sex, fun, etc., can have any genuine value to a human being, a human can understand and preserve these values from an "organism-centric" point of view. That is, I think human beings can learn to appreciate the world and their fellow human beings and the intrinsic, lived value of life, and act according to this understanding.

I don't see what altruism would add to a deep and detailed appreciation of the world, except perhaps a bit of obtuseness and self-endangerment. For example, there are various delusions which masquerade as a kind of altruism - such as identification with nation or religion to the point of killing one's self and others in battle.

"Many customs encourage responses to stimuli which are favored by one groups' "moral code" and disfavored by another's. This is unfortunate, and will eventually need to be fixed." - I don't understand what you mean hear. It sounds a bit ominous!

It is true that some people have always found a way to harmonize some of their desires and values, partially, with many others. But one can hardly imagine a human society without conflicts, and this is true even of bigger, more homogeneously-ordered societies, in which conflict often goes deeper underground (directed into random violence or subversion or self-destructive activity or feelings).

I do agree that humans have a lot of commonality in their motivations, and esp. the desire for social belonging makes many people willing to make certain sacrifices (or, in the future, to fundamentally alter their personalities to get along with most everybody else).

I also think of happiness as a kind of objective standard that will even point to a higher-order harmonization of desires that will work for most people. But not for all.

For example, people with little ability to appreciate others might in the future alter their personalities to be able to appreciate others better, because they sense that they would enjoy this better.

However, those who are antisocial because they enjoy being alone might decide they prefer to abandon human society altogether rather than become pro-social. I don't see any other possibility if human beings retain their inherent dignity, their ability to make choices about their own lives, which I think they should retain in almost every case. (Goodness you see I don't even make this an absolute.)

So, I think, our job now is to figure out just how diverse we all are (and I think many people are still ignorant or in denial about this, including me), to figure out what the possibilities for human-style happiness are (realization of personality-types), and then, perhaps, with lots of learning and flexibility, we can figure out new ways to harmonize our lives together without homogenizing ourselves.

1Arcturus,

I think your last sentence ("harmonize our lives together without homogenizing ourselves") sums up our agreement pretty well. Yes, there may be exceptions to the propositions I listed, but humans are still basically the same species and therefore share most of the same general behaviors, cognitive activities, desires, problems, and neural hardware as other humans. This doesn't mean that we can easily arrange a utopic, homogeneous society, and it doesn't mean we can't disagree, but it is a fundamental, empirically established insight that should enter into all discussions of human morality.

Sure, there is plenty of diversity among human cultures which should be respected and acknowledged, but we should also acknowledge our basic commonality and recognize that strategies for harmony in small human groups are probably scalable to a global level. (The tension between two nations is similar in structure to the tension between two tribes, or even two persons, in terms of the psychological dynamics going on between both sides.) From the perspective of a smarter being, human moralities are sure to appear deterministic and shallow, and easily put into a configuration where everyone is basically happy and the altruism/egoism dichotomy becomes irrelevant because everything goes so well that we don't have to constantly behave selfishly in order to simply survive.

Yes, there are millions or more moral choices. They can generally be represented by asking what types of choices people would choose in controversial moral issues of the day. Sometimes people all agree on something and simply move on. "Slavery is bad", "murder is wrong", "do as well as you can without making the lives of others miserable", etc., are general moral tendencies held by a significant percentage of the population throughout the developed world, and it would take a major economic or political collapse for us to ever backpedal on these tendencies. Though there will always be people that buck the moral trend of the day, this trend still exists and is arguably headed (by a variety of imperatives including economic ones) towards greater global cooperation, understanding, and altruism.

Hm, okay, I didn't realize that the word "morality" was etymologically related to the Latin word for custom. I suppose another word would have been more appropriate to describe what I was talking about. Compared to all possible alien species, human responses and the way that humans do things are incredibly similar. If two human beings were two newly built aircraft, they would be aircraft with 99.9% or more commonality in the way their moving parts operate. This is not the same thing as "having the same morality", it's just pointing out that differences in morality must correspond to a 0.1% (or whatever) difference in neural structure. We butt heads with each other not due to our differences in the greater scheme of things, but because we were built by evolution to compete, and to take up certain moral views based what culture we come from, the level of resources we have access to, our genetic predispositions, etc. These differences, however, might be considered trivial if observed from a sufficiently detatched viewpoint.

You say, "I also think of happiness as a kind of objective standard that will even point to a higher-order harmonization of desires that will work for most people. But not for all." Most definitely. If we make up a new word to replace happiness, like "I-want-it-ness", then we can include everybody, I should think. No one wants what they don't want.

Underneath the twisted mistakes touted as altruism is true altruism, the point of view it might be best to take if we end up with the power of gods (nanotech, AI, etc.) Being selfish in human form is okay, but if you can reshape the world any way you want, it's best to care for others. If I became a god overnight, wouldn't you want me to think this way?

Using the word "absolute" to describe any sort of commonality in human morality is perhaps a poor word choice. "Agreement", or "harmony" seem to work though, and once you can demonstrate to people that you aren't trying to screw them over, and that you share the same basic values, they will start to see you as part of the same social group and agree with a remarkably large amount of what you have to say. People don't talk as much about their moral agreements as their disagreements because often the best way to fit into a social group is to disparage the views of those outside it.

No purely altruistic motive has arisen in evolution because evolution has use for altruism only insofar as it increases genetic fitness. But this doesn't mean we couldn't create pure altruism, or perhaps choose pure altruism if we thought it were the right choice.

Is it necessary for a given human being to be altruistic to have a deep and detailed appreciation of the world? I would argue that love for one's fellow man is a deep virtue and that the sensations we get from caring about others - not just our family or friends, but humankind as a whole - are indispensable aspects of the human experience. What kind of deep and detailed appreciation of the world can you get if you don't have a deep and detailed appreciation of the beings living in it?

Of course, we should not force altruism on human beings without their consent. That would lead to the kind of dysfunctional society you're talking about. When I say that certain human customs cause responses favored by one group and disfavored by another, and this will eventually need to be fixed, I mean that we eventually need to set things up such that all customs correspond to a common standard that respects self-direction, liberty, freedom, etc. In this way, customs could vary and perhaps be frowned upon by certain human groups, but would never be outright evil (i.e., dowry laws, female circumcision, etc.) This would create a new foundation that would possibly lead to mutual respect between all human cultures. There is also voluntary brain reengineering/enhancement if it turns out that human beings are just too fundamentally immature to get along with each other. That is what transhumanism is all about.

Infern, exactly why I see no reasons in looking beyond the goal at this point.

I know of at least one person on this forum who doesn't want to have fun, and I know one educated member of this site who doesn't want to have sex.

I won't even bother to contradict the second part because we have whole threads dedicated to the subject even if IMHO they are just plain silly but could you enlighten me as to who is ridiculous enough to actually claim to not to want to have fun?

I would wish them great happiness with this choice but I guess it is a contradiction.

Laz,

I can put myself in a state of mind that has no desire whatsoever beyond the pursuit mentioned in this thread. So that would cover fun & sex.