Carleas wrote:
“Morality is an instinct in humans; while specifics differ, the existence of some moral system is a human universal. Humans (and some other social animals) instinctively adopt moral beliefs, both about their own behavior and the behavior of others.”
There is no morality in evolution, only survival of the fittest.
If that is the law then trampling on the person next to you is the modus operandi of getting there because that is what you are, that is where you come from.
Society today is turning freedom into bondage and life into misery as all of what we know today will be replaced with a planned electronic society in which our only value will be to produce.
Evolution cannot be used to define the principles which make us human because there is no ethic in evolution and I believe Carleas is basing his opinion on the basis of the evolution theory.
First and foremost to argue or agree with Carleas’s opinion one would have to accept the theory of evolution to be known or proved to be true.
Well, I disagree but without prejudice, as that is an understandable take if you define evolutionary theory as Darwinism.
Darwinism basically postulates that all evolution can be explained as nature selecting for survivability. This is a very incomplete take on evolution, and does exclude most things human. The contradiction of a theory that A is supposed to explain all life and B leaves a whole vast segment of human life out should ring bells, but it never does.
Yes of course nothing can evolve but that can continue to exist. This explains nothing.
True evolutionary theory should easily incorporate any and every thing that is included in life.
Therefore, if your theory on evolution cannot account for morality, it is an incomplete theory. In other words, it speaks for your theory being poor, not for morality not existing.
I asked what function trumps other functions & answered, “Treat the other as self.” You replied:
We would not have culture without morality (self=other), but there are many organisms which survive without culture or morality.
But all organisms have DNA. Code.
Is there a culture who encoded the first organism?
If artificial intelligence is designed & doesn’t happen randomly…
If there must be at LEAST two intelligences … neither of whom came first … in order to differentiate/individuate …
If perfection (say… of function) is not arrived at, but subsumes all arrivals/departures (demonstrations)…
If we can ask “What should survive? What needs to die?” in triaging between human life, endangered species, threats, and so forth…
If our inclinations to survive can be overruled when we risk our lives for the survival of others…
How does survival trump all functions? If we lived forever (no death door… no after…), and did not worry about survival… Do you think consent violation would be good?
No. That would be a living death/hell.
That’s why if science finds immortality, they don’t eradicate the afterlife/second death. They just … rip off the gates, shall we say.
Ahhhhhhh…. sunblock not needed? Could be worse things.
By the way, a lot of time when these moderners do this circular non-explaining thing, they are saying “because it feels good but I don’t wanna say it’s because it feels good.”
Sometimes they are right not to want to say that, like when they are developing and committing to complex political beliefs.
It’s about what is worth living or dying for. If it is worth living for, you give your whole life to it. If it is worth dying for, you would rather die if you could not give your whole life to it.
Merely surviving doesn’t answer the question “Why survive?”
Not that I have anything against surviving in & of itself… just … mere surviving.
From where do you think morals/ethics come from, dear?
God?
They are naturally selected behaviours that become ingrained in a social species because they offer an advantage.
Men simply encode these behaviours - categorize and name them, and then men adjust them to facilitate their objectives.
Evolution can account for morality, dear.
Have you not been reading my posts… .on KTS especially.
We witness what we humans call ‘moral behaviour’ in many specikes…
The connection between them is that they all practice cooperative survival and reproductive strategies necessitating the basic tenets of morality/ethics: tolerance, sympathetic bonding, cooperation, altruism/reciprocity etc.
Why is sex so central in human psychology, and the behaviours of many species?
Because it is a method of overcoming mortality - a limit to life.
In natural environments there is no need for “consent”, dear.
Consent has become necessary within manmade environments, where monogamy and integration are essential to group cohesion. Men expand/adjust moral rules concerning the unfit members of a group, to include them and make them investors in its welfare.
An example of an ethical adjustment to pre-existing, evolved, rules concerning sexual intercourse.
Without this ethical rule against rape or against adultery, a society deteriorates into intergroup conflicts, or produces and promotes un-invested, parasitical lifestyles that gradually drain its resources, reducing their competitiveness relative to other social groups. Necessity dear, is the mother of invention and creation.
Reproduction is NOT a universal moral good. It is essential to survival and so it becomes a moral good for species that depend on propagation.
No god required.
Evolved moral behaviours are not invented by a creator nor by humans.
Humans merely categorize and name them, identifying them as essential to survival.
Then, humans add to them amendments to facilitate their own enhancements, so as to increase survivability and the cultivation of what they deem to be an ideal man.
Evolution or Humanism or gobbledygook whatever one chooses to embrace, none have given a proven, factual understanding of where we came from.
Today we now know that the development of human embryos shows no evidence of evolutionary origins and Darwin’s theory has now been shown to be false. What is seen in laboratories today is DNA slowly deteriorating, not new DNA evolving.
Perhaps the most pertinent question we can ask about morality is whether it is useful to us.
Humans are complex because they can disconnect what they perceive as existing from what they desire to exist.
Noumena disconnecting from phenomena…and their propensity to fabricate linguistic walls to shelter their ego.
They can suffer from cognitive dissonance.
Basically this is caused by man’s emerging self-consciousness, or the ability to perceive from a third-person (objective) perspective - exposing humans to a new source of suffering.
Nihilism is how man attempts to protect his ego - lucid part of his consciousness.
To put it differently so you people can comprehend…homo sapient is the only species that can fabricate artificial environments attempting to “correct” natural environments, and can intentionally confuse itself by immersing itself in its own fantasies.
The ideal contra real is an expression of mind/body dissonance.
Confusion of the representation as being more real than the represented.
To simplify further… only one species can believe what is contrary to what it perceives, choosing to doubt its own senses so as to preserve its ideals.
Psychosis.
Only one species can synthesize alternate realities and then insist that they are more real than what it experiences.
Synthesizing a goat and a man, for example, to create a fantasy creature with no external referents… or invert reality by imagining a being that is everything it can never be, e.g., immortal, omniscient, omnipotent, incorporeal etc.
In the end magical emoters find common ground in their shared antipathy towards nature.
Magian.
Shared insecurities unify those who feel vulnerable, victims of happenstance, of nature’s injustices.
Victims of the world unite… Victim hierarchies are already established.
The supernatural is always where their feigned “humility” openly expresses their repressed overcompensating arrogance - via proxies.
They know what only a chosen few can fully appreciate. Occult knowledge, implying great powers reserved for the initiated.
A little scary to me that you and I seem to have quite similar understandings of morality.
On thing you said that I’m not sure I agree with (or maybe I misunderstand):
Are you endorsing this, or merely describing.
I think this is descriptively true, but I’d argue that it’s a mistake when people do this: ‘good’ and ‘valuable’ have meanings that derive from their function, and they become incoherent when they are applied in ways that contradict that function.
Morality is an evolved trait
a. The concept of ‘the good’ derives its meaning from evolutionary fitness
Reproduction has a positive effect on fitness
∴
Reproduction is good
This isn’t my claim. Rather:
What is good? An instinctual concept that shapes our behavior in ways that improve individual evolutionary fitness, and in particular by shaping our behavior towards others.
I don’t think the same circular pattern works against that.
I explicitly reject that “feeling good” is a basis of morality. In fact, as I point out in my response to @Bob, I think ‘feeling good’ has the same failure modes that ‘feeling moral’ does:
I disagree, and in fact the very existence of moral instincts shows that this isn’t true. The positive effects of cooperation on individual fitness are strong enough that there was a universal selective pressure on humans towards instinctively finding ways to cooperate, especially by creating rough consensus around norms and rules of behavior and treating those norms and rules as sacred.
Yes, I think morality is a distinctly social trait, and I would expect to find rudimentary forms of it in advanced social species.
That’s an interesting question, though I don’t know if the concept of “forever” is coherent in the universe as we currently understand. e.g. if we solve physical deterioration with age, we still need to get humanity off this planet in the next few hundred million years before the suns development makes it unlivable.
But with the significant caveat that the hypothetical is probably impossible, I can bite this bullet if I have to. I don’t think it’s fatal (or unique to my position) to say that nihilism follows from true immortality.
How so? I feel like I directly answered your question, but let me try again:
If we lived forever and did not worry about survival, consent violation wouldn’t be good, but the concept of ‘good’ would lose its meaning.
Neither. The concept of ‘good’ is an instinct that was selected for, i.e. individuals with that instinct survived and reproduced more effectively than individuals without it. That isn’t a normative claim, it’s a descriptive claim.
So… if consent structures can live forever… The first thing we oughtta do is violate as many consents as we possibly can, or what’s immortality for?
I don’t know, man; that just feels wrong to me. Even if I didn’t have any feelings at all, I would deduce that you can’t have consent structures constantly violating each other, internally or externally. There has to be some level of consent recognition or consent structures couldn’t exist.
This is also why there is no absolute evil, or a hell that could exist if God did not.
