Original Sin - Scripture and Reason

No. I've previously discussed what memes are made of in Message 9 and Message 18, and it wasn't 'immaterial spiritual substance' nor does it represent a dualistic account of things.And no, its not all a matter of memes. In fact, my main argument against GDR has been that it is not all a matter of memes. As I said, the effects are trivial because the example is trivial. But it does help the community because it saves other people from having to do it and the driver behind it may be something akin to 'help the community' and that means tidying up after yourself.

How do you know?

I'm not suggesting that you would necessarily be conscious of those motivations - some of them don't even 'belong' to you. For all I know you could have confabulated your own rationalization for why you do it.What do you think your motives were? And how have you established that they are the only motives at play?We could postulate kin-selection effects mis-firing. You want to help others in your community which results in increasing the frequency of the genes that drive helping others in your community.As Hamilton noted^*, the condition for helping are:B/C > 1/r
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B*r > CB= increase in relative's fitness
C = cost of behaviour
r = coefficient of relatednessOf course, genes don't have a reliable way of determining r, so rules of thumb may be applied. In the case of the shopping carts both B and C are very small and r is unknown but probably actually very small - though genes might be overestimating r (by means of creating cognitive rules of thumb to determine relatedness).There is absolutely no need for you to be conscious of this sort of analysis, so the fact that you don't remember consciously doing anything like this is not really the point. Your brain is making all sorts of decisions without making them conscious.Now I'm not suggesting that kin selection is what shaped the genes that encourage you to behave nicely in the specific case of the shopping cart. I am saying that kin selection probably shaped the genes the encourage your nice community spirited niceness you exhibit in any number of ways. And that the genes so involved, act in a way to further their own replication.Mutualism and reciprocal altruism may account for some other effects. If it makes you feel good to get your neighbour's trash can, and the cost for so doing is sufficiently small, you'll of course do it. And why does it make you feel good to do those things? Because you are a social primate that has evolved in small communities of about 100 or so that helped each other out even in small ways. You feel good, because your brain rewards that kind of behaviour, because that kind of behaviour strengthens the community, and by extension that helps you, your genes and your memes.And of course - if you are 'seen' to be a helpful person, others are more inclined towards being helpful to you. And since you can't be sure you are unobserved its best to advertise your niceness whenever the opportunity is not too costly. Again, this effect would have evolved under quite different circumstances as we face today, so it might not appear obvious by mere self-inspection.As Dawkins put it:

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misfiring by-product of our Darwinian past when we lived in small villages...which meant we were surrounded by close kin...one good pre-requisite for the evolution of altruism...we would have been surrounded by people who we are likely to meet again and again throughout our life - which provides the basis for the other main Darwinian reason to be moral or altruistic...although we no longer live in small bands, the same rule(s) of thumb...are playing themselves out under the alien conditions of modern urban society...

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...it has become modified and refined through culture...

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Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Why is it 'the right thing to do?'

It's not my theory. It belongs to various ethologists. I believe various psychological tests have been performed that confirm we are biased towards those that are related to us, even if we are not consciously aware of so being at the time of the test. Further tests show that humans are capable of mutualism and understanding reciprocal altruism. I believe it has been shown we are a social primate, with certain evolved traits - including behavioural ones. I mean, what aspect of the concept do you want to see testing for?

Right - it may help others. Why do you want to help others?

Since we're discussing ideas inspired by the likes of Dawkins - then its only fitting that I retort: Read Unweaving the Rainbow, which is more or less a whole book designed to refute this conclusion.

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After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked -- as I am surprisingly often -- why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

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If we're going to understand human behaviour, so that we can account for it in our social policies, we have to face the reality of the human creature and not hide behind comforting way in which we would like to be. Of course! Everybody does! We are driven to do the things we believe are the right things to do. Sometimes we are driven to do things we believe are wrong things to do. Sometimes we do things that in some contexts is wrong, but we can rationalize our way into believing it is right in this particular circumstance. But we might not in fact be behaving selfishly. We may actually be behaving selflessly. It's just that our genes are acting selfishly. Or our memes or whatever. You're free to try that, but a reasonable examination of the situation would reveal that it is in your self interest to not be (perceived as) a selfish asshole. So even if you are acting purely selfishly, you'll act selflessly.But it's not just about individual selfishness - sometimes its the genes that are being selfish while the individual is being selfless.

And your desire to do the right thing, outweighs your desire to avoid pain and discomfort. But where does this desire to do the right thing come from?You say its a duty, but you are not obligated to follow that duty. You must want to follow that duty, or you would do as many others do: abandon it as convenient.

But we are not born to be selfish creatures. The selfishness at birth is a temporary thing. We are born to be (at times) cooperative adult creatures. And I think Dawkins would agree with that. Not really, no. I believe that altruistic acts are driven by things which are acting in their own self-interest. They can still be 'truly altruistic'. And its not all genes. Its just that selfish genes can be a cause of truly altruistic acts by an individual. Just because the genes are being selfish, it does not mean that the individual is being selfish in acting in accord with those genes. I insist no such thing.But we don't need the selfish gene thing to get us there. We could just observe human development: We start as selfish babies and are taught to play nice. There: that conforms with you view of original sin.The fact that selfish genes can give rise to individuals that can be selfless (ie., the Selfish Gene theory) is an aside to all that. The accord between reason and your faith is simple observation, observation that almost certainly pre-dates the original sin doctrine. You don't need selfish genes to get you there at all.

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We have the power to deny the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination.

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I don't believe we can 'deny the selfish genes' completely - but we can certainly act in ways which act against the interests of our genes (such as contraception for example). But I suggest this is only done by either other genes (maybe genes that regulate when the right time to reproduce is) or memes (such as 'one shouldn't have children until financially stable'). And while we can overcome some memes - it is usually (if not always) as a result of other memes.

Humans have unconscious motivations behind their behaviour. This is an observed fact.jar is a human. This is an inferred fact.ergo, jar has unconscious motivations.I obviously don't know all the motivations that are idiosyncratic to jar - but I can suggest the ones which are present in humans in general.

OK then, so what obligates you?

Selfish entities can lead to selfless behaviour. That is, the Selfish Gene theory.This does not have any direct relation to original sin. Simple observation gets us that far. The fact that we have selfish genes does not mean we are built to be selfish individuals. While memes can help us be more selfless than we would otherwise be, they aren't necessary for generating cooperative behaviour.Also: just because you cannot discern a selfish entity acting in a selfish way in cases of an individual acting selflessly, that does not mean it's not there. And engaging in a process of recollection and self-inspection is not sufficient grounds upon which to assert that one knows that no selfish entities were acting selfishly; There are no grounds to suppose that the influence of selfish genes would be known consciously, for example.

I see you have a meme regarding doing the right thing. This meme 'it is a duty to do the right thing' drives you to do the right thing. This acts in accord with genes which are motivating you to do the right thing in the society in which you belong. The meme is acting selfishly, it is manifesting itself in your actions so that other observers may copy it. You repeat the meme here, you repeat it with your actions.So yeah - I'm happy to accept that your personal motivations are pure and true. That you have a duty-based ethic system that you believe you are obliged to follow. That no part of your social primate self is thinking in terms of reciprocations and mutualism. No problem. I don't believe it, as it is unusual, but I choose not to argue it.But to deny that there are absolutely not any selfish entities operating here seems strange to me. The only system you have given me for determining this is by self-inspection, but how can you self-inspect the operations of your genes on your own behaviour?

I wouldn't say it was a simple function of selfishness. It is a study of how a selfish gene can promote selfless behaviour. That's interesting, because we shouldn't expect selfless genes to be replicated often as per natural selection.That enables us to understand the beginnings of how and why and when social primates will cooperate. A useful bit of knowledge.But further study will reveal learning and culture as influences on decision making too. But knowing about how to raise a child to be a productive and cooperative member of society is useful knowledge too. I deny it does any such thing. It allows us to face the truth about human morality, how it works, how it can be promoted, how it can be exploited (and how any such exploitation can be rectified). IT encourages not to be static and accepting - but to ruthlessly enquire as to the truth about human behaviour, as free as possible from our preconceptions.how is it non-aspirational? What is it about it that makes it more 'accepting' than any other view of morality? No, not 'simply a creature of pre-programmed' responses at all. A complex creature indeed, one that makes decisions based on a number of factors. One that is given a brain shaped by both genes and memes.And no, I am not suggesting they are programmed to promoted its own survival or that of the species (especially not that of the species!). I am suggested they have neural based biases towards acting in cooperative ways which can increase in the gene pool, the frequency of the genes that create those same neural biases,Again, the individual may be acting selflessly. But that doesn't mean that selfish entities have not had their influence on that selfless behaviour at the individual level. Individual selfishness is not at the heart of the human condition, though it is a part of it. Individual selfishness is not necessarily what leads to altruism. Genetic selfishness can lead to completely altruistic acts (including dying for someone else). It really depends on your view of animal behaviour and evolution. Some people find it useful and interesting to know how animal behaviour can evolve, especially the kinds of behaviour that appear to run against the grain of individual self-interest. I'm not suggesting we always analyse behaviour in terms of selfishness. But we should analyse behaviour, and see what is driving it, and if it is behaviour we don't like - we can see how we can foster change of behaviour.This thread does not encompass my entire moral philosophy. The selfishness aspect is kind of integral to the thread's topic, hence its focus.To say that morality can be derived from amoral entities may be unpleasant, but no more so than saying that the Lilly is designed by blind agents, or that consciousness emerges from unconscious entities.We can still discuss the morality of euthanasia or blood donation without recourse to the evolutionary causes of our moral sense, we can tell it with all the poetic glory we like. We can dress it up in 'duties' or 'categorical imperatives' and all that wonderful stuff. We can even speculate on divine mandates and the beauty of justice and whatever else. That morality has a natural (and perhaps disturbingly mundane) explanation doesn't detract from any of that in my opinion. Why?Why would explaining to people that they are driven by both their selfishness and their selflessness cause them to act more selfishly? Remember, I am talking about individual selflessness being perfectly possible.

I see no need to do that. I think it's a fairly well established set of facts thata) Brains cause behaviours
b) Genes are involved in building brains.
c) There are some behaviours/biases etc common to just about all human brainsThere is no need to be able to identify which genes have which effect exactly.I mean a quick scout around the internet will probably turn up specific candidates if you were interested, but it seems way beyond the scope of this thread. From Genes to Brain to Antisocial Behavior proposes one such gene as possibly playing a role. I suppose more could be found.