[size=85]
[/size]
So, when you say “You brought him here to ILP, not me”, you’re denying that you posted the above? 
Because I mentioned him in a post once upon a time? You’re a funny guy!
Mimetic behavior has been observed in non-human species too as for instance chimps, bonobos and crows, parrots and corvids. Sorry if this fact doen’t get you back to your old belief system.
Maybe, but my own interest in distinguishing God from No God moral narratives [in connecting the dots between morality here and now and immortality there and then] is not likely to come up much among chimps, bonobos and crows, parrots and corvids.
Evidence of morality evolving in non-human species points to the possibility that Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche were wrong when they argued that in a God-is- dead world there was no basis for morality. Which is more likely that we evolved from primates that exhibit primitive moral behavior and then we forgot all that moral behavior and then turned around and reinvented it out of nothing or that our moralities are more elaborated versions of the structures that we see in species that share most of our DNA?
From the standpoint of a reductive mode of analysis it makes more sense to look at whatever people think about what you call “there and then” as a projection of “here and now” values. The ones that are species-wide probably have evolutionary basis.
Debate: Does God Exist? | Matt Dillahunty vs Michael Egnor:
youtube.com/watch?v=yahf0t5mK5g&t=7750s
Why is the linking and embedding system on ILP so crap?
KTS has an easy system. You need some code interventions.
Whatever.
dup
Thanks or the link.
Egnor is a dickhead. and when faced with a challenge to his positing objective morality insults Dillahunty, because he has not argument against him.
Morality of any kind rests on a community of human understanding agreeing that other people’s lives are important, because it nature lives are not so.
He thinks he has an argument that “raping a baby is objectively morally wrong” and thinks that because this is so god has to exist.
He has failed since that is not true. His problem here is backwards - he can only have god IF he proves morality is objective. This he fails to do. Dillahunty is WAY ahead of him.
To say that raping a baby is wrong is dependant on many things that are culturally subjective. Just because a majority opinion in our langauge community agrees does not make it objective. It makes it a majority opinion. THe fact is that babies do get raped, and a least for those rapists the wrongness has been challenged.
Rape of any kind is wrong, yet it is sexual abuse is horrifyingly common. The case that sex abuse is “objectively morally wrong” is absurd.
felix:
“dakat”]
Evidence of morality evolving in non-human species points to the possibility that Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche were wrong when they argued that in a God-is- dead world there was no basis for morality. Which is more likely that we evolved from primates that exhibit primitive moral behavior and then we forgot all that moral behavior and then turned around and reinvented it out of nothing or that our moralities are more elaborated versions of the structures that we see in species that share most of our DNA?
From the standpoint of a reductive mode of analysis it makes more sense to look at whatever people think about what you call “there and then” as a projection of “here and now” values. The ones that are species-wide probably have evolutionary basis.
[/quote]
Clever analysis which does in one sense begs the question.
For that, the object and the objective need to revolve around the projected understanding. And a reversal of epistomological content does make that possible.
We return to Sassure et al, and use meaning theory in the positivist sense, to overcome( in the Nietzchien sense) the regarded obstacles.
Induction uses 'inducement" as a method to undermine the objectivity which then is de- coded into and de-differentiated into it’s own background.
This process of entailment stops at the level of it’s basic evolving premise, or lifting from it’s ground, giving rise to a hypo-theatical state, that is a-priori sense of signaling.
In this process, the foreward transcending gap is established.
This backward loom into a probable intention to code, simultaniously establishes it’s possible decode, as limits of apprehension are approached.
The intentionality is signed into this constant movement, and the so called unmoved mover is the necessary entity, that requires this movement to attain primary significance.
.Ecmondu is right to assert the boundless, unlimited set which 'conscience fills it, for the opposite view, would reduce it to an absurd impossibility.
The same where an imededness were to beg it’s own inquery.
Why this is impossible, has only tangential significance to evolutionary principles."
So then when people “agree that other people’s lives are important” they oppose nature because “in nature lives are not so”? From whence comes this “community of understanding” then? It’s unnatural?
Cooperation is about reproduction and survival.
Natural.
The ideal placed outside space/time is a method of unifying heterogenous populations under an abstraction.
Like the US used the concept of “freedom”, to replace “god”.
Morality is the collective imposing rules - reward punishment - on those who which to include themselves within the group, so as to increase their reproductive and survival potentials.
Moral behaviour is part of many species which use cooperation to improve the odds that they will survive and pass on their genes.
No god required.
Religions are metaphysics for the masses; for the average mind.
Abrahamism is metaphysics for a world with no frontiers to escape into - other than esoteric ones.
They emerge when population pressures necessitate a subjugation of human nature through reward punishment on a supernatural level, to control heterogenous peoples with no common blood and no shared traditions.
Judaism appropriates Zoroastrianism and Egyptian monotheism and death worship to construct a narrative describing its historical suffering - when parasitism made them intolerable.
Like gypsies. Essentially they made the collective the abstraction of them - choosing themselves when all other tribes has rejected them. They made themselves divine and then denied this to all.
You should read what they think of goy, and what their prophesises say.
Christianity and Islam universalized this narrative offering salvation from reality to all.
But even god remains divisive so now we are in the next phase where the nihilistic idea/ideal is abstracted further to incorporate all.
Marxism was a step towards this secularization of Abrahamism.
A well-informed opinion. Freedom an abstraction? Enter Lady Liberty the goddess of freedom! Moral values seek embodiment. Mythos precedes logos. It’s a circle. No really it’s a spiral. The movement is upward. A return to the source? Could be!
It’s downward, but the return to the source occurs form the other direction.
Freedom = independence.
Life = dependence.
Freedom = degree of independence determined by power.
Confidence is its psychology. Options produce indifference for the particular. Reduced dependence on it.
I won’t argue that my own understanding of what they construed to be or not to be “the basis for morality” is more or less reasonable than my own. But Dostoevsky still managed in his own way to take a leap of faith to God while Nietzsche, in rejecting religion, attempted instead to sneak in his own Humanistic facsimile: the Übermensch.
Maybe no objective morality, maybe no immortality…but still masters and slaves.
Okay, pick one. Then, given your own moral convictions relating to a particular context, flesh that out for us. One thing for sure: don’t expect other primates to elaborate much beyond a very, very pale imitation of homo sapiens.
If you don’t think we need a context here, we are, once again, in two different discussions.
Or perhaps it’s both ways. Who knows? If according to your equations freedom equals independence, and life equals dependence, then does death equal freedom?
Death is the end of awareness. The dead have no will, no intent.
In my metaphysics non-living energies, even when unified into complex forms, follow the path-of-least-resistance and have no will, no intent.
Freedom only applies to life - energies unified and attaining intentionality, i.e., will. Only life can follow paths-of-more-resistance. The level of resistance indicating their strength, i.e., power.
Freedom is a comparison of wills. Power indicates how much resistance the will can overcome, and, therefore, how many options it can access, and therefore how indifferent it can become in relation to any one option.
Will = focus of an organism’s - organization of energies - aggregate energies towards an object/objective.
Subject moving towards an object/objective.
As such…
God is man’s idealization of himself.
Pagan gods represented natural forces, given human personalities, representing the synthesis of man with his environment.
The one-god of Abraham abstracted the concept of god out of existence - placed it in a noetic plane outside space/time, i.e., outside existence.
So it is a concept of the non-existent.
This is why it is given supernatural or absolute characteristics that do not exist and cannot exist, because if they did they would negate existence. Nullify it.
So…
Will to Life, becomes man’s will to be immortal.
Will to Power, a human need to become omnipotent.
God of the nil.
Positive nihilism is a literal self-contradiction. It is a mind fabricating a concept that contradicts - negates - its body - the physical, the tangible, empirical, verifiable, falsifiable…Mind/Body dissonance. Schizophrenia.
Most nihilistic variants - spiritual or secular - are guided by an ideal that is unattainable and if it were unattained would end existence.
To put it another way…it projects an objective that does not exist anywhere but in the minds of those that hold it to be true. A concept that must remain as obscure as it is non-existent, existing only semiotically, as words/symbols.
All concepts can be converted to this kind of obscure abstraction.
Like “value”…as someone here already did.
Like “love”, as Christianity does.
Like “morality”…like “male/female”.
Concepts are detached from their tangible, physical referents and placed in the beyond, as iamretarded would say “on skyhooks”.
But they want them there.
All nihilists want the words, referring to their preferred concepts to be as abstract, as vague, as intangible, as idealistic, as esoteric, as obscure as possible.
Then they can manipulate the concept without any limitations other than their psychological effectiveness . They are opportunists. They don’t care about integrity, only effectiveness.
They are not interested in philosophy, only politics - art of manipulating the masses.
If the concept can be used to exploit, manipulate, seduce, coerce, bribe others and bind them to their own will then it is a “good definition”.
Here…humanity = world and world = humanity.
Okay. If the structure of moral behavior is hardwired into us by a natural process, (e.g. natural selection), morality is not objective in the sense of being"out there" in the environment somewhere. But it may be discoverable in our own being. And, surprise surprise, it is! In our conscience which speaks to us inwardly and involuntarily even when we don’t want to listen. and there are our reveries and our dreams, which tell us about aspects of ourself that we don’t want to see. And there is the whole world of mythology, the narratives that told humanity about itself before some of us became too sophisticated to listen.
So no the chimpanzees are not likely to enter directly into this discussion. But we would do well to look at chimpanzee politics if we want to understand our own. Status for chimps like status for people depends on more than ambition and raw strength. Often chimps need strategic savvy as well to reach dominance and hang on to it. And for that they need to know how to act cooperatively with others to get what they want. They have to know how to connect the here and now conditions of their present social situation with the there and then of their desired position of dominance in the social hierarchy.
So politics is related to morality and religion even among our primate relatives. Religion in this case being the would-be alpha chimp’s fantasy of being at the top of his social system enjoying the privileges of food, sex and comfort and social support that position brings.
THE STONE at the NYT
Morals Without God?
BY FRANS DE WAAL
Sure, there is no doubt that there are biological imperatives embedded in whatever you wish to conclude that morality is. Social instincts beget the need for rules of behavior in order to facilitate the least dysfunctional human interactions. And these rules are going to be enforced in any particular community based on traditions, customs, folkway, mores and laws that reward one set of behaviors and punish others. And there are certain behaviors that tend to be punished in virtually all cultures down through the ages: killing and stealing and raping and robbing others.
But “for all practical purposes” this can mean many different things depending on when you were born historically and what communities you were raised in culturally.
Here of course it falls somewhere between a wild ass guess and a more or less educated guess. And isn’t that where the “popularizers” often are? They use science…but they might need to “dumb it down” for those who would be unable to follow the actual science.
And, once you throw God and religion into the mix, it only becomes all that much more problematic. Let alone it comes to revolve around “I” in the is/ought world.
Instead, from my frame of mind, the “thin veneer” emanates more from those philosophers who become “ethicists”. They can go off the deep end with complex “theoretical” conjectures about morality up in the intellectual clouds.
Then I come along – here for example – and muddy the waters all the more by insisting that we need an “actual context” in which to examine those intellectual assumptions.
Another “general description intellectual assessment”. Though, again, if I do say so myself.
And all I can do over and over again is to ask you to note how, given a particular context, this is applicable to your own life when connecting the dots between morality here and now and immortality there and then. What unfolds “in your head” in “real time” to motivate you to choose this behavior rather than that?
Okay, but another way to look at it is…memetically. And our species has a whole fucking boatload of them. While with chimps the memetic surface is barely scratched. Again, this is the part that those like Satyr play down. The more we can make it all about biological imperatives the more “social, political and economic constructs” are to be understood only insofar as they reflect Satyr’s own assumptions about genes > memes “natural behaviors”. In regard to, for example, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality…and on and on and on.
Yes, but chimps don’t have philosophers and political scientists and ethicists to justify or to rationalize this behavior. It really is far more natural behavior…driven more by the id than by the ego or super-ego.
Then, in nature, this part: 4elephants.org/blog/article … %20bonobos.
[b]"Bonobos
Two of the closest animal relatives to humans are the chimps and bonobos. Not only do these two primates contrast in appearance, but also in leadership styles. Males lead the chimps while the bonobos are female-led.
The bonobos are led by females who keep the peace between the male and female bonobos. These females usually team up together when they have to confront a male bonobo."[/b]
On and on I go…and the more I go one way I turn back and realize I could have gone the other way…not really, but let’s repetend this is so.
The more I pretend there is no way to explain human behaviour by studying other species, the more I am exposed as a moron.
Like https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=170060&p=2845980#p2845980
I return and turn…and twirl…like a zombified ballerina.
Negating, denouncing, rejecting, nullifying…and offering no-thing…NOTHING, to replace what I’ve undermined, critiqued,…because philosophy is about Mary’s abortion issue…and not about the human condition; because philosophy is about destroying and creating craters of voids, so as to promote the uncertainty of fragmentation that will make my postmodern utopia possible…in my imaginary world where there is no us/them, no war, no conflicts.
A world of peace…like death. A peaceful death.
A Paradise after death.