Philosophical heckling

[Burning ghost]

Dark Matter -

As everyone else seems to have no problem understanding the grammatical construction of that sentence I will move on ...

When you are talking about secularism and atheism, you are saying basically that non-religious people lack morals, understanding of ethics, etc,., or that they have a different kind of "morality" and "ethics"?

When I mentioned "empathy" I was simply referring to when I see someone suffering I feel bad for them, I put myself "in their shoes". This to me is how social morals are formed. They are certainly not clearly defined or accurately measureable in an objective sense and I can appreciate that my likes differ from others. This is an important part of development in children and the "terrible twos" are part of this development where children purposefully do "bad" things in order to learn about how others react.

Certainly fables and moral tales can teach these things more clearlt and help people to consider the intricacies of ethics and morality. There are many questions we can ask that cause moral and ethical conflicts. By exploring this questions we can maybe help ourselves, and others, when real life confliction happens. If we are encouraged to be definitive in our convictions all of the time we risk losing a broader perspective and succumbing to mere automated reactions, impulsively and without considered thought of there possible implications.

[Felix]

I make it a point to heckle my own ideas every day, then I get to be both the heckler and the heckee - twice as much fun.

[Burning ghost]

I make it a point to heckle my own ideas every day, then I get to be both the heckler and the heckee - twice as much fun.

Yeah! I know that one. Sometimes I have a thought that seems "perfect" so I call myself all kinds of names to open up problems I have no doubt missed.

[Dark Matter]

When you are talking about secularism and atheism, you are saying basically that non-religious people lack morals, understanding of ethics, etc,., or that they have a different kind of "morality" and "ethics"?

All I'm saying is that they have no rational basis for it. But that's for another thread.

[Gertie]

Actually science now has a pretty good big picture account of the evolved caring and co-operative impulses under-pinning what we've come to call 'morality', which is backed up by research on the universality of such impulses, and some of the biological mechanisms involved. Tho obviously the reality is highly complex, and in different times and cultures they've manifested in different ways.

So Morality is another of those God of the Gaps arguments which are being closed down as we learn more. Not to say that the old myths and narratives which tried to grapple with these questions didn't serve a purpose, and still do for many people. The lack of Objective Morality somewhere 'out there' or revealed from on high can be disconcerting, it leaves us to grapple with the questions of how we treat each other, and what is a good life, as best we can. But there ya go. On the whole I think a realistic understanding of ourselves is for the best.

[Dark Matter]

Actually science now has a pretty good big picture account of the evolved caring and co-operative impulses under-pinning what we've come to call 'morality', which is backed up by research on the universality of such impulses, and some of the biological mechanisms involved. Tho obviously the reality is highly complex, and in different times and cultures they've manifested in different ways.

So Morality is another of those God of the Gaps arguments which are being closed down as we learn more. Not to say that the old myths and narratives which tried to grapple with these questions didn't serve a purpose, and still do for many people. The lack of Objective Morality somewhere 'out there' or revealed from on high can be disconcerting, it leaves us to grapple with the questions of how we treat each other, and what is a good life, as best we can. But there ya go. On the whole I think a realistic understanding of ourselves is for the best.

I'm fully agreeable to the idea that morality has evolutionary underpinnings. In fact, I would not expect anything else.

[Gertie]

Well that's the now understood reality of the 'rational basis for morality' for us sophisticated social mammals, yours and mine, theist and atheist.

[Burning ghost]

When you are talking about secularism and atheism, you are saying basically that non-religious people lack morals, understanding of ethics, etc,., or that they have a different kind of "morality" and "ethics"?

All I'm saying is that they have no rational basis for it. But that's for another thread.

I agree. When people try to reduce ethical questions to pure rationality they will hit a wall or turn it into a non-ethical question.

[Dark Matter]

(Nested quote removed.)

All I'm saying is that they have no rational basis for it. But that's for another thread.

I agree. When people try to reduce ethical questions to pure rationality they will hit a wall or turn it into a non-ethical question.

Exactly.

Well that's the now understood reality of the 'rational basis for morality' for us sophisticated social mammals, yours and mine, theist and atheist.

An evolutionary understanding of morality is just that, and understanding. But what does it tell us about morality itself? Nothing, nothing at all. How much has this understanding improved the human estate? It hasn't. The pursuit of the impossible (i.e., the TRUTH) perverts our faculties and makes them unfit for their natural use.

We are told that the first men, seeing their shadow, or seeing their own image in a dream, conceived the idea of an apparitional soul or ghost soul. Whatever the historic data on this subject may be, it is evident that the act of Reason which we are aware of in ourselves by experience as much as we are of “sight” and “touch,” is not reducible by any number of intermediary terms to such acts of duplication. Reason, instead of being a fact of pure subjectivity, tends to set up things in themselves and to objectivate phenomena: and possibly it is the fundamental condition of our psychology that we are not, like animals, bound up in our own sensations and in perceptions of ourselves. From the moment that man is no longer content to devise things useful for his existence under the exclusive action of the “will-to-live,” the principle of Evolution has been violated. Between this state, which is wholly subjective, and that in which a man finds interest for the first time in a straight line, there is a greater distance, logically, than there is between inertia and life, than between Reason and what the Mystics call “Inspiration.” The first step taken by the mind to surmount the subjectivity of its representatives is the first step towards the Absolute. -- Edouard Récéjac

-- Updated December 10th, 2016, 10:21 pm to add the following --

"....the principle of [physical] evolution has been violated."

[Renee]

From the moment that man is no longer content to devise things useful for his existence under the exclusive action of the “will-to-live,” the principle of Evolution has been violated. -- Edouard Récéjac

Ay vey. Back to attacking evolution again. Getting really tiresome. Esp. that it's a false claim, and you believe it SOOOO much that it's true.

Edouard Recejac simply does not understand the mechanism of Evolution.

Since he does not, he creates an idea that he THINKS is what evolution is, this idea of his is wrong, he proves it wrong, and he claims that the principle of evolution has been violated.

No. He just proved that his false understanding of what evolution is has been violated.

It is so simple... it is so elegant... how you can mistake it and create a false theory and EQUATE the two is what... I can't.... see... how... intelligent... enough... people... can... do.

If someone is so simple that he or she can't comprehend properly the neo-Darwinist theory, then I ask, what is that person's role on a philosophy board? This is a simple, elegant, and smooth theory. There is not much complication in it. It is self-movating. What is not to understand there? Complexity? there is no complexity, overly. A hitch, a trick? No hitch, no trick.

All I can say do is a face-palm, when I see arguments proposed such as this.

This might STRENGTHEN and often does, the fervour of the religious in their belief that evolution is false: "Look, the words there tell that "EVOLYOOSHON FAILED", and it was said by a person who is smart, and therefore this must be true." It is a typical tactic the religious use to spread the "Good News": appeal to authority.

However, the audience here can't be fooled by presenting thoughts of improper logic and false facts by authors. Here you have an audience that thinks for itself, and critically analyzes and tells wrong logic from right logic, false facts from proper facts.

I am just so dismayed by the quality of thinking by some of the contributors here. No critical analysis, no mental work put into posts, just slavishly quoting some authors who may be famously revered in churches and prayer houses, but whose theories fall to pieces under the slightest scrutiny. Personally speaking, Dark Matter, you are a highly intelligent person, in my esteem, and your thinking has been dumbed down and formed to not flower in its own glory by your teachers who kept telling you dogma after dogma, and stifled your brilliance and your creative capacity to do analytical thinking.

I am not trying to give you false compliments. On these boards you have demonstrated, that you are capable of understanding complex ideas, and even that you changed your thinking on some topics due to understanding those ideas.

I suggest that you practice in the future applying your intelligence to critical analysis. You are on your way, and though I am not a good teacher for you, because my style is provocative, I know there are others here on this board who can make you think for yourself. When I say things, I say them so that you get your back up. That is due to my style... others here are different.

Edouard Récéjac could only say what he said because he believes, mistakenly, that Evolution demands that there be some kind of progress, and mankind's progress is on a straight-line progression. This is borders on a pre-deterministic, and it is compatible with Christian thought. But Evolution never claimed a progress, or a progression of development.

All you have to do is take the evolutionary theory and plug in the proper values for the corresponding variables.

If and when mankind acts against its own interest, and even if it wipes itself out, in evolutionary terms what happened was that the environment was such that humans could not adapt to survive in it, and human life was made extinct. The environment was created by the humans themselves (such as a nuclear holocaust), but still, in terms of the evolutionary theory, it is merely the environment.

You heard about the asteroid meteorite that struck the earth and wiped out millions of dinosaurs, makng thousands of dinosaur species extinct. Substitute humans for dinosaurs, and nuclear holocaust for asteroid meteorite, and don't change the formula.

There is no violation of the evolutionary theory when and if such an event occurs.

[Dark Matter]

Er...you're bias is showing, Renee. Note the amendment at the bottom. Recejac didn't attack evolution at all, nor does he demand that there be some kind of progress or that mankind's progress is on a straight-line. He just said that physical evolution doesn't explain man's objectification of his environment. Present-day scientists tend to agree. Hell, there's no consensus on what consciousness is or even if it is. If it was as simple as you say it is, that wouldn't be the case.

There are noted scientists who argue that consciousness is intrinsic in the universe. If materialism is all there is, human consciousness is either part or an effect of this reality. Therefore, we are bound by reason to conclude that that consciousness is an effect entirely absent in its cause -- in short, that something coming from nothing, or we have to say that consciousness is a special form of unconsciousness -- in short, not really conscious at all. Either way, you have some pretty high hurdles to jump before being so sure of yourself.

Descartes got a lot of things wrong, but one thing he got right was that atheists “are in general sciolists rather than ingenious or learned” and, in general, “all which the atheists commonly allege in favor of the non-existence of God, arises continually from one or the other of these two things, namely, either the ascription of human affections to Deity, or the undue attribution to our minds of so much vigor and wisdom that we may essay to determine and comprehend both what God can and ought to do; hence all that is alleged by them will occasion us no difficulty, provided only we keep in rememberance that our minds must be considered finite, while Deity is incomprehensible and infinite.”

This being said, this is so far off the subject of this thread I'm going to excuse myself from further postings.

[Gertie]

Gertie wrote:
Well that's the now understood reality of the 'rational basis for morality' for us sophisticated social mammals, yours and mine, theist and atheist.

An evolutionary understanding of morality is just that, and understanding. But what does it tell us about morality itself? Nothing, nothing at all. How much has this understanding improved the human estate? It hasn't. The pursuit of the impossible (i.e., the TRUTH) perverts our faculties and makes them unfit for their natural use.

You just agreed that evolution explains the existence of these social and caring impulses which over time mistakenly came to be seen as something objectivity real in its own right - 'Morality'. That's what we now know 'morality itself' is.

It's uncomfortable. It creates a challenge for us. Perhaps we'd have been better of believing the old stories, they created some good and some harm. Or maybe it's like when the obelisk appears in 2001, we're only smart enough to discover what morality really is when we're smart enough and mature enough to deal with it (the obelisk is an analogy there).

The up side is that the caring impulses are real, as real as the selfish ones. But they evolved at a time when we lived in small tribal groups and strangers were threats or competitors. Understanding that with our big thinky brains, perhaps we can find ways to extend our natural 'circle of care' beyond their evolved limitations, to work better for us in our vast inter-connected globalised world. Find ways of valuing our shared humanity and living together in better ways than the old religious models have bequeathed us. Or maybe we're not mature enough, I guess time will tell.

[Fooloso4]

DM:

it means that secularism has its feet planted firmly on thin air.

But so does theism. The trick, one which Wile E. Coyote never learned, was not to look down. There are neither theoretical nor transcendental grounds or foundations, only human claims about their existence that cannot be firmly established. Those who have their feet firmly planted on the terra firma do not look beyond the fact that we are in Nietzsche’s words “esteemers” who set the value of what we value.

If materialism is all there is, human consciousness is either part or an effect of this reality. Therefore, we are bound by reason to conclude that that consciousness is an effect entirely absent in its cause -- in short, that something coming from nothing, or we have to say that consciousness is a special form of unconsciousness -- in short, not really conscious at all. Either way, you have some pretty high hurdles to jump before being so sure of yourself.

It is not a matter of cause and effect in a linear sense with A being some unknown variable that causes B or human consciousness. It is not something from nothing but rather, from an evolutionary perspective, the result of cumulative change. Consciousness does not suddenly appear with the first human. Far more simple organisms are sentient. There is no dividing line between sentient and non-sentient organisms, only an increased ability to respond to their environment. Admittedly, we do not have a full explanatory picture, but that is not a good reason to jettison the whole thing and declare that consciousness exists without explanation prior to anything we know of that is conscious.

[Dark Matter]

Interesting. Even after I excused myself from further postings because this is too far off the subject matter of this thread, people continue to "heckle" because I happen to have different beliefs than they do.

[Felix]

There is no dividing line between sentient and non-sentient organisms, only an increased ability to respond to their environment.

Seems to me that sentience is the dividing line, as it's required to respond to one's environment.