Robin Yergenson wrote:Hi Metacrock,
You seem to be making quite an effort to be inflammatory. I either offended you or it’s that “guilt by CARM atheist association” thing. I hope we can have more charitable discussions in the near future.
No I'm not. sorry you think so. I don't hold it against you for being a carm athiest. they weren't all stupid. Fleet is a carm atheist I don't hold it agaisnt him. Or QT he was too.
I’m not surprised that you see evolutionary psychology as “a bull shit field” since you probably don’t accept natural evolution either.
wrong! I do. I am an evolutionist. you just have to get over the idea that anything lauded atheism is not necessarily right just becuase it is lauded by atheists. It's not a valid field just because it has "evolution" in the title.If you study the history of the field is it sociobiology and led to the bell curve.
I see it boiling down to our attempt to look for natural causal chains to explain things before arbitrarily leaping to “therefore magic.”
your willingness to characterization anything not reductionist as "magic" shows that you don't know the opposition ideas, you don't know the basic thinking behind your opponent's views and you are just spitting back slogans.
I mean, our success at living depends upon identifying effects with their causes, and if we explain things in magical rather than natural terms, that only works if we’re right, and given that magic can be an explanation for literally any and every event that occurs, concluding “therefore magic” prematurely is going to mess with our success at living and thriving. Not good. I’m guessing that you will label this as “bull shit” too. You say,
yet modern atheism has given up cause and effect to explain the existence of the universe as not needing a cause. One of many foundational contradictions in the atheist view. That's an old and outmoded view point. Modern theistic belief has no problem with naturalistic C/e. Since modern understanding of laws of phsyics is descriptive you can't argue that there's a natural barrier to SN and you can't evoke the natural to hog reality against the SN. All you can say is "I have not see this." I have so your description is incomplete. laws of physics are merely descriptions of how the universe behaves, but they are human descriptions and thus they are incomplete. They can't form structures that rule out God because you can't observe everything. That would also be prescriptive.
Metacrock: Of course not. No amount of genetic predisposition to a behavior could ever attack moral aspects to something. That is merely the fallacy known as Hume's fork. Trying to derive an ought from an is. It doesn't explain why we have ethical and moral motions in the first place.
Yergensen:I have read two of Hume’s books and I have a lot of respect for him but I don’t buy into his “is/ought gap” dilemma. If your most fundamental essence includes the will to live and thrive, and if you are a rational volitional being who depends on making good choices in order to obtain living and thriving, then there are particular things that you ought to do and there are particular things that you ought not do if you intend to obtain your most fundamental desire to live and thrive as defined by your very nature as an organism. Let me guess. You will label this as “bull shit” too. And I had said,
You are doing a bait and switch. You are using the word "ought" but you don't really have the logical means to attack a moral ought. You are using ought in a utilitarian or pragmatic sense. "One ought to do what is most expedient." that's not making it moral.
Moral thinking is totally left out of the picture then you call it "ethics."
Rob: As rational volitional beings, we have to grasp enough of the essentials about reality so that when we choose to act in order to obtain some goal, we obtain our goal a sufficient amount of time. But we also have to determine what it is that we "ought" to act to obtain. Now, it is our nature as an organism to prefer to live and thrive. In terms of value, since nothing will be of value to me if I no longer exist, I need to maintain my existence in order to make value of any kind coherent in any sense. That’s because things do not have intrinsic value. Value is only coherent with respect to a valuer. So then, that most fundamental value of living and thriving needs to be recognized as our deepest value and the basis for all our actions.
You responded (surprise surprise) with,
Metacrock: That is such a line of bull.
sorry that is an irritating phrase. I gotta get a new one. Please don't read in the derisive nature tot that it seems you are assuming. It's just a Texas working class expression.
you are not inventing an ethical value just becuase you use survival instinct. BTW Schweitzer tried to do that and yet he still opposed biologically based ethics. He couldn't really prove that just having a survival instinct translated into a moral ought.
Rob:You went on to say,
Look at what you said. You have basically just back peddled on what you said before. You agree just having a genetic behavior doesn't make it moral, now we do a bait and switch to plug in moral thinking and attach it to survival instinct for some such thing then the bait and switch, try to be convinced that their highest values really are what you want them to be, the genetic endowment, even they don't know. You are in effect saying "you just don't know what you really want, what you really want is what I think you should want."
I appreciate your “bait and switch” accusation. In some ways it is valid. But for example, because it is beneficial to my genetic strain, I have a genetic predisposition that makes me want to mate with every attractive woman I see, but because I realize my genetic predisposition doesn’t define what I ought to do, and because it actually damages “me,” I keep that predisposition in check. Yes, I am also genetically predisposed to want to live and thrive. But it’s because my existence is a requirement for my valuing anything, and because value is only coherent in the context of a valuer, maintaining my existence is a most fundamental precondition to my entire value chain. If I cease to exist, so do the values with respect to me as the valuer.
It's a mistake to impose survival as a some kind of determining factor in ethical theory. The reason humans value self sacrifice is because we are able to understand that some things are more important even than surviving. The basis of moral thinking tells us this. You are trying to make desire the basis for moral good. That subverts the true nature of moral good, which is duty and obligation.
Rob:Regarding your comment, “saying ‘you just don't know what you really want, what you really want is what I think you should want.’” No. At bottom nature (God?) has predisposed us with a will to live and thrive. This isn’t whim based. This is something we recognize and discover when we objectively reflect upon what we are. Some things that we prefer are aligned to that most fundamental value and some things are not. Again not based on my or your whim but rather something that exists in objective reality regarding our nature that we discover and align to. And you say,
We are also capable of giving it up for the good of the other. Of course you know I'm from Texas so I was raised on the story of the Alamo where the lesson is that laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, such as the cause of Freedom, is the highest good, not survival.
Meta:(1) Who put you in charge of decided what is the greatest value?
Rob:As I addressed above, I am not the authority here. Reality itself is. We discover it. And you say,
that's a cop out becuase you clearly think you have the right to interpret reality and decide for others what is the good. You think basing it on something factual like survival is justification for you being the orbiter but it's not.
Meta:(2) The only logical thing to which we can turn that's not biased is society itself. We have a vast universal tradition; in every culture that goes back to the indistinct mythic time of "in the beginning" that puts sacrifice of self for the tribe, or even the individual, above anything else.
Rob:Your “tradition” and “indistinct mythic time” are hanging on a sky hook.
You are so used to ridiculing religon you forget myth is also historical artifact. That proves that this is a value going back as far as you can go in culture. trying to counter with survival instinct wont work. I'll show you on the next statement:
Rob:That which enhances genetic benefit of the species is what your tradition is rooted in and as such it is no basis for my morality. Our predisposed nature as defined by nature (God?) is the ultimate source of logic. Society is not a rational volitional being. Rather, the individual members of society are, and as such, they and their predisposed natures are the ones who ultimately define the proper response to “what shall I then do?” And you say,
that's your arbitrary reading, which is realities to your understanding. you privilege your positional so that you erase all other aspects and culture and thought and just think"the scientist says this the scientist is the elite keeper of knowledge, so the science get's to decide." NO you don't. Survival instinct is just a fact of nature. it's no more good or bad, right or wrong than anything else in nature. It's just neutral blank nature. It's not moral. To be moral it must be a
decision.
Morality = decision making.
society has coped with the need to survive for millennia and it has always come up with the value,the tribe matters more than the man, self sacrifice for the other is valued.
Meta:(3) The time in Western culture and even eastern when the individual didn't count for much and the tribe was all that mattered sacrificing oneself for another member of the tribe was deemed laudable. We have the precedent of society that tells us self sacrifice is a virtue. you are not going to change that with a bait and switch that translates Any Rand's stupidity into pseudo science via the socialist workers party president Erranrich.
Rob:Yes Rand was definitely in error in some very significant respects, so don’t map me to her. And I’m not familiar with Erranrich. I lean more toward libertarianism than socialism so your name dropping is not communicating.
LOL sorry. Just letting you know I'm not totally unread in the field. I don't claim to be any expert in it, which I'm sure you can see.I was in the wake of the socialist workers party at one time that's how I know about her political views.
Rob:Metacrock, come on! You need to quit mapping me to such a despicable loathsome thing. I am not your enemy.
haahahahaahaha sorry buddy. I guess I have a habit of stereotyping.
Rob:We should be allies against the error that exist between us and in our human society as a whole. You’re starting to sound like Matt Slick.
O God no! Not that! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAa
Rob:Please do not respond until you are able to be more objective and charitable in your responses. Miles, I’m hoping that you will weigh in too, and hopefully in a more objective way. If you have questions which surely you do, please be more constructive and charitable in your delivery. Oh, and for future reference, my name is spelled “Yergenson” not “Yergensen.“ If you can't edit it I understand.
I will try to restrain my stereotyping. It's my Texan nature. We are very crusading. We are defenders of the Alamo. We just in there go after the enemy. Not always with wisdom.
Rob (Keep smiling!)
As an aside, I want to let you in a little on me. This morning I awoke with a dream where I was being lured into a Islamic radical fundamentalist group (one of my more powerful managers in real life who is a Moslem was amongst them). In my dream I let them know that the real Jihad is not with those who fail to align to your world view but with error itself. None of us wants to be in error and as such, we should all recognize one another as allies against error. Those whom I addressed in my dream were receptive. Will you be? Come on, yes I might be in error, but if so I am the one who stand to benefit most, and you will benefit too, since I will then be a better member of your and my human society. I really am not the enemy here! Quit treating me like I am,…so that I can deceive you in my clever satanic ways… who – who – ha – ha – ha – ha – u – u – u… Sorry, just having fun (but I really did have that dream).
there's a kind of person who has taken over the age. He thinks humanity is inefficient and need to be reduced to robot-ism. he thinks scinece is the only way to think about things and it's a real self selective version of scinece that reduces and loses phenomena then calls it "reality."
What we tried to do in the 60s was great. We failed because we were children we didn't realize the value of the past. So the next generation totally thew away our project and decided to kill humanity and robotize everything.
I'm not saying you are one of them, but one must always be on guard.