Is that a fallout 3 avatar Xun? I was looking for a picture of the one with the arm growing out of the guy’s stomach and pointing at his face, while the guy has this horribly dismayed look on his face.
In the same way that wood can be brought down to the molecular structure of wood, morals can be brought down to neuronal networks (ALL OF THEM) anyway. It seems that they exist objectively enough, that things, structures in the real world are producing them.
I’m not saying all morals are adaptations, but that all moral thoughts, moral considerations, and moral actions, exist due to PHYSICAL OBJECTS INTERACTING, in certain ways. All thoughts that humans have objectively exist as in, to have the thoughts at all, people need to engage small physical subunits into action to produce the thought.
My grandmother exists, but more than that the THOUGHT of my grandmother exists in my brain, its not just a ‘thought’ any time I think about my grandmother, specific networks and specific neurons, specifically for remembering/associating/interacting or whatever, come into play.
say, if I have moral X idea, every-time I think about moral X in specific ways, a lot of the SAME NEURONS, same NEURON NETWORKS, are responsible for allowing that to happen.
When I look at a table, the table exists, but more than that, by conception of the table exists as a map of neurons, in the shape of a table, in my brain.
all morals objectively exist in the brain, because different thoughts require different patterns of brain activity/activity/interaction. When I think ‘cat’ neurons dedicated to ‘cat’ go off in my brain (thats not correct. As the thought is generated by the neuronal activity but you get the idea. the neurons probably go off first), the same is true about morals.
The critical difference is that neurons don’t produce fictional characters, right? The neural activity, doesn’t create a fictional character, that jumps into reality and acts or DOES some-thing.
The same isn’t true of moral feelings. When the neuron fires, the person FEELS a sense of right and wrong over some-thing, in the case of fictional characters when the neurons fire, we imagine them, it doesn’t produce them.
Oh, and some-times neuronal firing does create fictional characters, people with fake lives, fake memories, fake personalities, well perhaps not fake, so much as FICTIONAL CHARACTERS. Someone with split personality, may have personalities of ten different fictional characters, that is characters with lives/memories which don’t actually exist.
if split personality Joe is convinced that he’s aggressive and mean because of these vivid memories of his childhood, being raised, schooling, parenting, all of which didn’t actually occur in real life, well thats the case of neuronal states creating fictional characters in some sense.
I guess thats not what you meant. But again, my point is that morals are a mental state, some-thing like anger or fear or even a reasoned out idea, fictional characters, are generally not mental states, and when they are, in the case of split personalities, they can be produced by neuronal activity.
There may be more to the ultimate definition of morality than ‘mental states’ but morality could be defined as a mental state giving that; which we obviously can becuase any thoughts or desires or feelings are mental states, than they’re created by some-thing, they’re made up of parts.
Morals/thoughts are like engines, in that they’re made up of PARTS. I’m not sure, how some-thing made up by an interaction of parts, can be said, not to exist.
I understand the idea that we can say consciousness doesn’t exist in a sense, but is some-thing which the brain does* an interaction of parts and components. Is that what you mean?
Morality is a system of labels. Animals exist. Taxonomy does not. We just made taxonomy up. To suit a purpose. You can’t go out and get a pound of taxonomy, but you can get a pound of zebra. But neurons fire when we think about taxonomy.
The taxonomy example is precisely what I tried to preempt by mentioning polyester. Some things are real because we make them real. It is about how we break the system down. Now, I’ll agree with you on the idiopathic nature of truth, but I don’t see how that conflicts with what I’m saying without adopting such a stringent definition of ‘existence’ that nothing exists.
I’m also troubled by your concept of how things that don’t exist seem to exist in an acausal environment when things that you consider not to exist do seem to obey basic cause-effect relationships.
Cyrene,
Fallout 2, actually. I just re-purchased it. Great, great game. And keep up the good work, I can agree with what you are saying.
Xunzian - I can only believe that you are playing, here. Polyester fibers are real - so is steel, or any number of things we have manufactured by recombining stuff that was already real.
Alright; but for example, morality is a label for a belief about right/wrong or a sense of right/wrong, in a lot of cases, one can bring that down to the components which make it up, brain states, different levels of brain activity.
All words are labels, that doesn’t mean a dog doesn’t exist because the word ‘dog’ is a label, in the same way the word ‘morality’ is a label, for the specific types of beliefs surrounding concepts of right/wrong which humans have historically made, for all of those things we ‘label’ as morality, we can look at the interacting parts creating them in the brain, in some cases, we can even point to adaptations which produce them!
they may only exist in-so-far that they exist as neuronal states in people’s brains, but that still is existing in a pretty important and significant way right?
Well, Cyrene - When we are very young, we have many fears that we later overcome. And we gain fears as well. I don’t think infants fear the fires of Hell, and many adults don’t fear the dark as they did as infants. Many Native Americans believe that it is wrong to kill any creature except to eat or otherwise utilize that creature, so swatting a fly just because it’s annoying is precluded. But this belief is taught from a very early age.
We have emotions - hardwired emotions, many of them. And it stands not only to reason but to scientific scrutiny that these are inborn. But many times we can say “I feel this” without knowing the answer to “Am I right to feel this?” Morality is the arbiter, sometimes, or all the time.
The fear of snakes and spiders may be inborn, but the decision to kill a harmless spider may be the result of a people’s narrative about spiders. And even how we feel about killing a spider can be altered by the moral narrative, if that narrative includes killing spiders. Labels such as “good” and “bad” modify the label “dog”, or in my example “spider”. The spider exists anyway, yes.